The evidence is circumstantial, but this is in fact evidence

No, not really. “He could do it” is not the same as “he did it”.

If that’s not good enough for you then you have more faith in his character than I do

That would be the case if I said “he didn’t do it”. However that is not what I’m saying, what I’m saying is more like “dunno”.

…I edited the earlier comment mentioning the Epstein files. There might be some actual evidence there.

About principles:

I am talking about presumption of innocence = innocent until proved guilty. Not defamation. More specifically, I’m contradicting what you said in the other comment:

Innocent until proven guilty is for a court of law not public opinion

If presumption of innocence is also a moral principle, it should also matter for the public opinion. The public (everyone, including you and me) should not accuse anyone based on assumptions, “trust me”, or similar; we should only do it when there’s some evidence backing it up.

Not even if the target was Hitler. Because, even if the target is filth incarnated, that principle is still damn important.

Now, specifically about Bezos:

I am not aware of evidence that would back up the claim that Bezos has CSAM in his personal laptop. If you have it, please, share it. Because it’s yet another thing to accuse that disgusting filth of. (Besides, you know… being a psychopathic money hoarder, practically a slaver, and his company shielding child abusers?)

EDIT: let me guess. Epstein files?

“Innocent until proved guilty” is also a rather important moral principle, because it prevents witch hunts.

Plus we don’t even need to claim he got CSAM in his laptop — the fact that he leads a company covering child abusers is more than enough.

Given the current political landscape, I find way more likely that some random American province declares independence than a Canadian one.

I called them “Berlin balls” but I don’t know their actual English name; in Polish they’re pączki, in Portuguese either sonhos (dreams) or bolas de Berlim (Berlin balls). Their dough is similar to donuts, but they don’t have that hole, and they’re typically filled instead of topped.

Dough:

• 3~4 cups of flour (375~500g)
• 1/2 package of instant yeast (~7g? amount can be eyeballed)
• 4 Tbsp sugar (50g)
• 1/2 tsp salt (3g)
• 1 cup lukewarm milk (240ml)
• 2 large eggs (100g)
• 2 Tbsp veg oil (30g)
• vanilla extract to taste

Finishing:

• veg oil for deep-frying
• either caster’s sugar or refined sugar, for sprinkling
• filling of your choice [see notes]

1. Mix all dough ingredients together, starting with 3 cups of flour. Add more flour as necessary; the resulting dough should be wet, but not too sticky, you should be able to spread it afterwards.
2. Knead the dough and let is rest for two hours or so. It should visibly expand.
3. With a rolling pin, spread the dough on a flat and floured surface, until it’s ~1cm thick. Cut it into discs with a cookie cutter, a glass, or similar; I aim for 8cm diameter discs but you can make them larger or smaller as you want.
4. Let the discs rest again, for 90min or so. Note they’ll expand mostly vertically, the discs won’t get meaningfully larger but they do get thicker.
5. Deep-fry the discs in oil, 180°C, until golden.
6. Sprinkle sugar over them, preferably while still hot.
7. Let them cool, make a small cut on their sides, and use the cut to fill them with a sweet paste of your choice.

Notes:

• from my experience, the actual amount of flour varies quite a bit. That’s why I suggest starting with 3 cups and add more as needed.
• don’t spread the dough too thick. Otherwise it gets raw inside. [insert Gordon Ramsay meme.]
• as you cut the dough into discs, the leftovers can (and should) be rolled together, for a second batch. Do note however this second batch of dough tends to be denser than the first one, so you might want to roll it thinner than the first one.
• fillings are up to your taste. There’s no “wrong” answer, but you’ll probably want something with strong flavour. Common fillings here are jams, dulce de leche, whipped cream, chocolate ganache, guava cheese. I’ll also provide recipes for two that IMO work great.

Pastry cream:

• two yolks
• 1 carton of condensed milk (400ml)
• 400ml whole milk
• 1 Tbsp cornstarch

Just mix all ingredients and let them cook over low fire, while mixing constantly, until it thickens. Then let it cool.

Homemade strawberry jam:

• 500g strawberries
• juice of one lime
• sugar to taste

Clean and coarsely cut the strawberries. Then cook them with the lime juice and sugar, until they start breaking down. Then let it cool in a hidden place so your mum doesn’t eat it all by the spoon. (Mine did it once.)

I got barely any work this week, so I’m mostly playing OpenTTD.

All Mangas Reader bugged out, and I lost the list of ~500 manga series I was tracking. Ouch. This was a blessing in disguise, though; it forced me to install Suwayomi. After I got used to Suwayomi I learned to love it better than AMG.

My arm is full of small scratches and bites, because one of my cats needs to be pet 25h/day, paws my arm when asking for attention (without retracting the claw, bloody arsehole), and to make it worse she gets overexcited if petted for too long. She’s almost 17yo so I’m cutting her some slack.

Thanks to the same cat, though, I almost got a heatstroke. Summer has been harsh these days; she likes to sleep in my room, but hates the fan, so I was avoiding to turn it on. …I kind of brought this to myself, didn’t I?

I invited my mum yesterday to an all-you-can-eat steakhouse. It was a pretty penny (I paid for both of us), but she was extremely happy. Specially because steakhouses here often have seafood dishes, and she loves seafood.

Speaking on food. I prepared 600g worth of flour in Berlin balls for a party, and at the end it was all gone. People loved them, and even asked me the recipe. (It’s simply a Polish recipe I translated, adapted, and filled with a pastry cream.)

I think comments should have a milder version of the rules of posts.

If you let politics run wild in the comments, the target audience (people who want a break from politics) will start avoiding them, and that’s really bad. And yet people sometimes can’t help but point out some political aspect of the comic; specially if leans towards this, like that comic about the parents betting on the child’s gender.

I also think the sidebar needs something addressing more explicitly that “ackshyually everything is politics lol lmao” discourse, so you can get a bit rougher with posters bringing it up. I think it’s important to do so; while it’s technically true (yup, there’s politics everywhere, even in knitting), the main reason people would bring it up in a comm like this would be to convey “I feel entitled to shit your community with content that contradicts its goals and reason to be”. It’s a yellow flag for a potential troublemaker, you know?

This made me think on the potential roles the three outer planets* (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) in the scheduler.

• Uranus: looking at things from a new angle. Innovation, intuition, ruptures with tradition. Higher octave of Mercury; so if Mercury is ruling network and I/O tasks, perhaps Uranus could rule specifically data creation and writing?
• Neptune: elevating things past the concrete, into the abstract. Inspiration, illusion, refinement. Higher octave of Venus; so if Venus rules desktop and UI processes, Neptune could focus on the windowing system.
• Pluto: changing the nature and “hidden-ness” of the things. Metamorphosis, unearthing, cycles of [con/de]struction. Higher octave of Mars; so if Mars handles CPU hogs, Pluto could handle specifically things that have to do with cryptography.

*before the “ackshyually” crowd points this out, the word “planet” in Astrology is used to convey any moving (from our PoV) celestial object. It includes things Astronomy wouldn’t consider as planets; such as the Sun (a star), the Moon (a satellite), and Pluto (nowadays a dwarf planet). So the situation is a lot like tomatoes being fruits, you know? “Yes” or “no” depends on the definition, and the definition is built around a purpose.

Also I’d like to point out that, although I learned a fair bit of Astrology in my teens and 20s, I don’t take it seriously. It’s mostly babble, like tarot; but just like tarot, it’s fun babble.

Trump has a fascination for strong men. He wants to be seen as one. That’s why he reacts so violently when people point out he’s tiny dicked, or why he simps so much for Putin.

alkaline hydrolysis

So, they dump the body into lye. Like some killers do in movies.

…I actually like the idea. Specially if can choose where all that liquid fertiliser (formerly my body) will go. My family already knows some shit I want them to do regarding my body, once I kick the bucket, and “dump the fluids under an Araucaria pine” would be just another.

I remember Angela Collier talking about this topic, but basically: the “AI” in question is a different beast from the “AI” in chatbots and image generators. The underlying tech is the same (artificial neural networks), but instead of making the bot mimic human output, you’re asking it to point out stuff.

So for example, you feed it with two sets of data:

1. a bunch of pics of completely normal astronomical objects
2. a bunch of pics of anomalous astronomical objects

Then you “ask” the bot to assign new pictures (not present in either set) to one of those sets.

In my opinion it’s one of the best ways to use the new tech. If there’s a false positive, nobody is harmed — the researcher will simply investigate the pic, see there’s nothing worth noting there, say “dumb clanker”, and move on. Ideally you don’t want false negatives, but if they do happen, you’re missing things you’d already miss anyway — because there’s no way people would trial down all those pics by hand.

It also skips a few issues associated with chatbots and image generators, like:

• since it’s “trained” for a specific purpose, it isn’t DDoSing sites for training “data”. It’s all from the telescope, AFAIK in the public domain.
• no massive training = no massive water/energy cost.
• no concerns related to authorship or whatever.

Be glad they didn’t include Neptune, Uranus or Pluto.

Imagine some system task running like your computer was a potato. Then you look for the reason, and it’s because the task is a CPU hog, and its associated planet is in Cancer/Scorpio/Pisces. Now imagine the associated planet was Pluto, that spends ~20 years per sign. (Note some astrology schools do take those planets into account.)

In fact even system daemons and kernel threads (Saturn) will be a mess, 2.5 years per zodiacal sign.

So yeah, fucking dumb idea. But brilliant at the same time.

This looks like a notoriously bad idea.

In 2023, a city (Porto Alegre) near-ish my homeland approved a law initially proposed by ChatGPT, then manually reviewed and edited. Here’s a link; it shows both the initial proposal and final version (both in Portuguese).

The law addresses some shite the water and sewage department (DMAE) did often:

1. install new water meter for a house, with no regards to its placement or securing it properly
2. wait until water meter gets stolen for parts (welcome to Latin America!)
3. charge house owner for a new water meter
4. go back to step 1.

So a councilperson prompted ChatGPT to draft a law addressing it. And the draft sounds reasonable… until you inspect it further, and notice a certain article omitted from the final revision:

[Rough translation] 7th article. DMAE shall be allowed to establish complementary norms to regulate the enforcement of this law.

Why was this article omitted? Remember: DMAE was the very department being legislated against. If allowed to issue “complementary norms” regarding that law, the law would become toilet paper — because all the department had to do is to claim “the law is only valid if the theft happens in the 31st of February!” or some equally dumb shit.

The issue I mentioned above was fairly specific, the solution was straightforward, and mostly non-partisan. And the entity in question was a city government, so no “nested” political entities. And the e-muppet was still able to drop such a huge bollock.

What would happen if this was done on a country level? And it included partisan matters? And the issue was something complex, with no “right” answer?

That’s what I’m thinking, while reading the link in the OP.

It’s also called “gasosa” (gaseous), depending on the actual dialect. Some even distinguish both.

On refrigerante vs. refrigerador, both are from the verb refrigerar (to cool). Originally their suffixes did different things:

• the -(e)nte in “refrigerante” would be an active participle, allowing the verb to behave like it was an adjective. You can still use this suffix this way, for example in “a moça cantante está triste”, but note how old-fashioned it sounds like.
• the -dor(a) in “refrigerador” is a “proper” agent nominaliser, converting (in. Unlike the above, it “should” convert the verb into a noun.

So “refrigerante” would be loosely “cooling” (as in, a cooling drink = bebida refrigerante), and “refrigerador” would be “cooler” (as in, the cooler).

That’s fine until you remember Portuguese allows you to convert adjectives into nouns by simply using them as nouns, no fancy derivation needed. So that all those verb forms ending in -(e)nte were also being used as nouns. “A bebida refrigerante” → “o refrigerante”, boom, new noun.

To make it worse -(e)nte is falling into disuse. In some cases it has been replaced by the gerund (refrigerando) or infinitive gerundive (a refrigerar); but in most cases by that -dor(a), since they were both in the same turf. As a result, people are losing track of the association between the verb and the noun (that used to be a verb form): presidente/presidir, agente/agir, pedinte/pedir etc.

Non-photosynthetic plants (like ghost pipes) are typically rather small parasites of other plants, that for some reason lost access to good sunlight (such as being so deep in a forest that other plants call dibs on those yummy photons). I don’t see how it would be the case here, given the fossil in question is 8m tall, and apparently it predates actual (Viridiplantae) trees. And I think the same reasoning applies to a potential Rhodophyta = red alga.

Because of that I think it’s way more likely the taxon in question is related to both, but part of neither. And the reason it’s heterotrophic (as per Wiki article) is because it never developed something similar to photosynthesis on first place.

In fact the size is bugging me. Why did it grow so big? Plants usually do this because they’re trying to outcompete other plants, but that doesn’t make sense here.

In a certain way the second food bowl was his reward, now he didn’t need to do that weird ritual just to grab a snack. But yeah, that guy was brilliant. (The female was also brilliant, in her own ways. Such as refusing to get out of the way if you asked her rudely — no “shoo”, no “get out”, only “excuse me?” made her give way.)

I had two poodles through my childhood. One of them (Willy) often did this, except towards the gate of the house, barking 2~3 times, even if nobody was on sight. Then the other poodle (Lana) would quickly follow, spend a few minutes barking at it, even after Willy gave up and went back inside.

We often joked our street was haunted because of that. But eventually we discovered what was happening: both felt peckish at the same time, Lana called dibs on the food bowl, and Willy wasn’t willing to wait. So he barked at some non-existent threat, forcing her to investigate it and leave the food unattended.

Buying a second bowl exorcised the ghost from our street.

Lewd cellular automata.

Reminder capybaras are wild animals and can carry diseases, such as the spotted fever. And they reproduce really fast: in nature they reach sexual maturity in a year and half, and have 4~5 pups per year. At least here (where I live they’re native) there is some predation, but unless you keep the population in check they’ll go from “aww” to “eww” really fast.

And no, hugging the capybara is not predation.

My guess is that it’s a relative of red algae and plants/Viridiplantae, but not quite either.

At least one source mentions it produces lignin or something similar; lignin is present in both clades I mentioned. However since it doesn’t do photosynthesis we can rule out belonging to those clades, I genuinely don’t think evolution would favour ditching phycoerythrin or chlorophyll, so odds are it never developed either.