I’m currently reading Babel by RF Kuang, which definitely can’t be described as woman-centric (indeed, a major criticism is that its female characters are relatively shallow and few and far between). Good book though.

If you want an old classic to try, give Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees a go. Very unique and fairly influential cult classic from 1926.

I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then “catch up” by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.

canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African

Canonical is British. Headquarters are in London.

The founder, Mark Shuttleworth, is a South African born British citizen, hence the African name for the distro. But it is and always has been British.

Maybe I’m just tired at the end of a long day, but I’m also completely unable to parse that headline. Somebody’s mum is fingering what now?

maybe turn the three sisters

Two of the three precogs were boys, by the way.

That’s encryption in a nutshell. A message is encrypted until it reaches its destination, and then by necessity is unencrypted in order to read it. Once your recipient has the unencrypted message, you don’t have any control over what happens to it.

Fundamentally, if you don’t trust the recipient (or their system provider), no amount of encryption will protect your message.

“Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”

“If they look like this animal then they are the animal” really doesn’t sound like a particularly useful (or scientifically rigorous) position.

Not least because there are lots of animals that look alike but aren’t the same species.

FFIX is my favourite FF game (yeah, fight me on it), which means this news is either very good or very bad depending on how the remake ends up.

In my limited experience experience, Gemini responds better with flat, emotionless prompts without any courteous language. Using polite phrasing seems more likely to prompt “I can’t answer that sorry” responses, even to questions that it absolutely can answer (and will to a more terse prompt).

So I think my point is “it depends”. LLMs aren’t intelligent, they just produce strings based on their training data. What works better and what doesn’t will be entirely dependent on the specific model.

trying to tell us that in a couple years we’ll have a full-on AI film

To be fair, he never said it would be any good.

We need a US Community on Revolt too not just Lemmy

Never heard of it before.

What’s the elevator pitch?

“We don’t like the proposed new Coke recipe, so we’re switching to drinking raw undiluted sewage instead”.

There’s a direct quote from the company.

According to a statement sent to The Verge by Eddie Garcia on behalf of Nintendo, it says preorders will no longer begin on April 9th:

“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”

I’m also in Europe.

Presumably the same tariffs will apply to PlayStations and Xboxes too (both made in China with components from Korea, and the former being a Japanese company).

Also, most PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

American gamers aren’t going to be overwhelmed with cheaper choices.

They’re definitely creatively stale, but they’re also undeniably good at what they do. They have by far the best selling console of the last generation, and are the only console company to consistently post healthy profits on their operation.

Is it a bit naff that their next generation of games will almost certainly be yet another Zelda, yet another Mario, yet another Pokémon? Absolutely. But if their next Zelda game is yet another best-selling critically acclaimed success, who are we to say that they’ve got the wrong approach?

Depends what you’re after. I’m a Thunderbird user, but if user friendliness is the aim then Geary is quite good.

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Ubuntu Touch is such a nice user experience. If it had an Android-tier app ecosystem it’d be a very nice daily driver.

Orwell’s Animal Farm would seem like a good way to go. Not having any Orwell in a dystopian literature class would seem like a miss, and Animal Farm’s heavy parable style sets it apart from the others in the list.

Off beat suggestion: The Lorax by Dr Seuss. It might be interesting to study dystopia aimed at younger children as part of a full exploration of the genre.

Possibly somewhat on-the-nose, but It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis is fairly timely.

Back with the classics, perhaps The Trial by Franz Kafka. Very effective and highly distilled form of dystopian text, boiled right down to its elements.

Shout out to The Last Man by Mary Shelley, which is a contender for the first true dystopian novel (certainly one of the first worth remembering).

There’s also just no real incentive for them to do it. The number of devices running fully de-googled Android forks are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Everyone running devices with non-standard Android but which still uses Google Play Services and the rest are just as valuable to Google as the ones running stock. And it suits Google to have the small ultra-privacy hobbyist market still running Android forks, even de-googled ones, rather than moving on to something else entirely.