apis

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Years ago, my parents set out on a long journey from their home city to a rural location in another country.

Approximately five minutes after setting out, a car went flying past them. It was a bright red sports model that was very eyecatching.

Not long after, they arrived at a toll bridge, right behind the same red car. They noted the number plate.

Past the toll, the red car sped off again, quickly accelerating well past the speed limit.

Over the next few hours, this repeated at a major junction. When they eventually arrived at the ferry again just behind the red car, my father flashed his headlights.

Disembarking, they got another flash from my father, and sped off.

Several hundreds of miles later my parents arrived at their destination, parked up, and got out to stretch, when pulling in beside them was a curiously familiar red car.

Not wishing to make assumptions, my mother casually checked the plates, then saluted the driver and inquired about their journey to the event they had all arrived for.

Nope, they'd made no detours or stops, they'd taken the same route.

My mother has a way in these situations of wording things just so, that totally makes the person she's talking to feel like an absolute worm without ever getting the escape of thinking my mother was being anything other than lovely and charming to them.

Red car was spotted driving most sedately in the local town the following afternoon.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

Because they mostly have no clue that measles is a potentially fatal illness, with potential severe lifelong complications including some which require 24/7/365 full nursing care.

They think of it as a mild rash with mild flu-y symptoms for a week or two.

They also have no idea it is so very contagious.

So though the measles vaccine has an amazing safety & efficacy record, whether singly or as part of the combined MMR, with endless research turfing up no link to autism whatsoever, and carrying only a negligible risk of vaccine injury (none as severe as the complications of measles), those who reject it do so not only out of totally false beliefs about the vaccine, but also out of fully wild misconceptions about the risk of measles.

Though now the anti-vaxx movement has become such a big thing for a while, they're all egging each other on with the help of ideological pundits. This combines to create a group highly distrustful of public health organisations and all medical advice on the matter, who are much more resistant to accepting correct information than their vaccine-shy counterparts ever were in the past. It also seems to be true that scary conspiracy theories are comforting to them in a world where serious infections can just catch a person, where autism isn't something one can simply opt out of - they want simple answers, and everything which debunks that simple wilful ignorance is a threat to their sense of security.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

"Neither" implies they have an opinion on the relative prioritisation of the US and Ukraine by the UK, and believe that both should be prioritised to a similar degree:

"Don't know" implies they do not feel they know enough about the relationships the UK has with either country to form an opinion.

But yes, there is some fuzziness, as anyone who does not care is more likely to choose "neither" as there is no "either" option, yet many of this type of respondent will have picked "don't know".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Possibly emerged from a triskelion, which exists as a motif across Europe and beyond, but especially in regions associated with Celts, morphing into legs for reasons unknown and a few meanings attributed long after the fact.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Pretty sure AfD's Alice Weidel additionally doesn't even live in Germany but in Switzerland.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Have always loved Dixon.

Reminds me of being a very small child, in that cusp between everything being strange and inscrutable, and the unshakeable confidence that everything sometime would be solved.

Though the friezes my toddler self gazed upon baffled and sleepless were much simpler, as a preteen pretending with protractors simpler again being mostly transparent, now blank and pitiless, there's all the plainlitoccult puzzlement of youth

no wonder my brow so furrows

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Fantastic guide, and though am neither trans nor American, not fully knowing what to do to preserve material for vulnerable communities under threat has been gnawing at me.

Thank you for sharing!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It is a hormone, so it has the potential to give rise to mood disorders.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.

Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.

I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.

Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.

I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.

Using Mojeek currently, which isn't great but not too terrible.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Yup.

DuckDuckGo's search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we've been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.

Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.

No matter, DDG's utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we've seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.

It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Aye.

Have developed the habit of unblocking telemetry every so often, so that the settings I value show up as in use by someone.

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