romwell

Please leave your nonsense elsewhere, and don't pollute this forum with cliches devoid of thought.

If you have a point to make, do so, and figure it out before you say it.

In any case: a "gimp suit" only means one thing, it has always meant that one thing, before GIMP-the-software was a thing.

This doesn't apply to "things you left here", so please put them where they belong.

This is why searches for GIMP will inevitably land on BDSM imagery. A teacher that tells kids to "use gimp" (or, Cthulhu forbid, the GIMP suite) is risking their job no matter how many things you suggestively leave around.

If you missed the offensive part, look up "gimp suit" for many more interesting results.

Nobody is forcing anything, it's just that if you want people in the US to use this software, you should call it something else.

That's beside the point that "gimp suits" aren't offensive, they're a perfectly fine kink and an element of BDSM. Just very much NSFW.

And GIMP's avatar very alluding to the gimp suit isn't helping either.

Why don't you get off your kink-shaming horse and use Google, from a private window or friend's machine (because I don't know what's going on with your search history either).

Finally, saying "You got BDSM stuff when you looked for this software package? Oh, you must be one of those people, I get nothing like that" is a sure way to get people to never use the software in question.

That's beside the point that you are not earnest here by using an niche search engine to say what you "got".

Here's a Google search for "gimp" from my work machine: https://imgur.com/a/E5M5wHF

Thankfully, I'm working from home. One could literally get fired if this showed up on a monitor in the office. Prison in some countries if kids see that in school too.

But sure, it's not an issue for you, so what's the problem?

My point in this case would be that you're either blind or lying if you don't get any BDSM costume pictures mixed in. Or, at best, that Google gave you personalized search results that aren't what people see when they do the same search.

Try doing it from a private window / a friend's machine.

Also, look up "GIMP suite" (suite is not uncommon to refer to software packages). Have fun.

Please, do some due diligence before making comments like this. You are incorrect.

Your link counts refugees.

It does not count:

- people who left Ukraine and permanently settled abroad

- people who left Ukraine on work visas

- people who ended up under Russian occupation

etc.

Ukrainian population has plummeted by 25% due to the 2022 invasion alone[1].

The war didn't start then, either. Crimea and Donbas were occupied since 2014. 3 million people in occupied territories[2], technically, never left Ukraine.

Another red herring is the phrasing as refugees or asylum seekers.

The latter does not nearly account for everyone. With millions of Ukrainians having family abroad due to war, and, at this point, millions of those settling permanently abroad, millions of Ukrainians are eligible to immigrate to reunite with their families abroad. Working families, mind you, Ukrainians integrate well, and not refugees anymore.

I am a Ukrainian living in the US. I have evacuated my MIL from Kyiv the first week of the 2022 invasion. She ended up living in the US until her death from cancer this year, and she is not counted in your stats.

As all Ukrainians, she had a 90-day right to stay in the EU, visa-free. She didn't cross the Ukraine-Polish border as a refugee. She had an active Canadian visa from a couple of years ago when she visited her daughter there, so she didn't enter Canada as a refugee. From Canada to the US, we used the United 4 Ukraine program when it was instantiated[4], a remarkable achievement of Biden's administration.

You may note that it is distinct from "temporary protection" status, and requires someone in the US to sponsor you. It is a parole status; my MIL didn't enter the US as a refugee or asylum seeker.

Her friend, whom we managed to get onto the same evac train, remained with her daughter in Spain. She was eligible to do that years earlier. Reuniting with a family member doesn't make her a refugee or asylum seeker.

I can go on and on with examples, that's not the point.

My point is that the only accurate measure of the population drop is looking at the number of Ukrainians who remain in non-occupied territory of Ukraine to gauge the impact of the war on the population.

You will not find this number. If the government of Ukraine were to publish it, there'd be panic. You will only find estimates. And when you add up the estimates of how many people ended up abroad, you'll see that a third of the population is quite reasonable (a quarter of prewar 44 million is a lower bound estimate).

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/22/ukraine-population...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-occupied_territories_o...

[3] https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/03/12/7446142/

[4] https://www.uscis.gov/ukraine

I'd recommend looking up "gimp" in an image search, and not dismissing valid concerns as trivialities.

On the note of misinterpretation, I'd recommend looking the word "gimp" in a dictionary[1], which offers this:

gimp(n.): 1. offensive : a disabled person

The "explanation" that GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Package works if you're an edgy 13-year-old. Beyond that, any sane person would question the wisdom of using that particular acronym (and why not go for BOOBS or FATCOCK if you really don't care).

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gimp

So, if I have a playlist in Spotify to listen to on long hikes, I will find out that I can't play it when I get to the hike (unless I use Spotify all the time, or think about this crap in advance).

Thanks, I understand that I can jump through hoops to make it work.

But an MP3 works 100% of the time, every time, without any of that crap, or thinking; I copy the file to a memory file once, and that's it. No passwords, no accounts, no internet, no logging in.

Many bands I listen to have Bandcamp/SoundCloud accounts, which offer DRM-free audio downloads. I use that when it's an option - and it pays the artists orders of magnitude more than Spotify ever will.

If I have a CD from a local show, I will rip that.

Otherwise, I am not going to make my life more inconvenient for the sake of a major artist getting $0.000002 from my Spotify subscription. I'll pirate their work.

The problem isn't lack of data service on ships. It's things stopping to work offline.

About a third of Ukrainians are currently outside Ukraine due to war.

Even setting that aside, [citation needed] that providing additional soundtracks comes with an additional cost to the streaming service, and if so, that this additional cost is upfront (and not per stream).

If the publishers are so idiotic as to kill Ukrainian language distribution outside Ukraine with their fees, that just shows that piracy is necessary.

Knowing people in Ukraine, it's less likely to be stupid greed than plain old stupidity (like Daenerys, the officials and executives in Ukraine kind of forgot that Ukrainians outside Ukraine exist). This is a discussion for another time, though.

I didn't even bother bringing up accessibility, since it's so laughably broken (if not outright ignored) with all current streaming services. It is, at best, an afterthought.

None get even close to matching the functionality of a plain old DVD.

Or, since we are in 2024 - an MKV file with multiple audio and subtitle tracks, which the pirates care about providing, and the streaming services do not.

_______

PS: if you're trying to learn a language, US companies often refer to subtitles in the language of the audio track as "closed captions" rather then "subtitles"[1], with the target audience being hearing impaired people.

Look for the "CC" button, or "accessibility" options, and you may find what you look for.

YouTube provides automatically generated subtitles for many videos (of varying quality) with the [CC] button in the video controls.

[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning

Then there's languages and subtitles, and publishers still don't get that shit right.

FFS, I can't watch a Ukrainian movie in Ukrainian outside Ukraine, because the publisher only released the English version on US streaming services.

And if I want to watch a film with a soundtrack in one language (the original, perhaps) and subtitles in another (out of the ones I speak that it better translates to), sayonara, we're hitting the torrents.

Oh, and go figure, sometimes you just don't have a reliable Internet connection where you want to watch a movie. Unbelievably, but it does happen if you go outside the house.

Do you know any single person who travels outside of 4G coverage?

Because the $5/$10 mo doesn't do much for you in a National or State Park in the US two hours away from a major city.

Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one.

Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_...

You... You missed out on the whole vaccines part here. Amazing.

>What would have changed if the restrictions were 6 or 12 months shorter?

Everyone would get hit with COVID before vaccines became available.

The healthcare systems were on the verge of collapse as it was; this would ensure the collapse and mass deaths (and long term disabilities for many others).

>Nothing

The confidence with which you're saying nonsense based on absolutely nothing is admirable, but the bullshit you're spouting isn't.

Next time, don't ask questions if your answer is premade.

But hey, most implementations talk about using quaternions, which scare people.

And so the author of the article (...and a lot of software) is completely ignorant of how e.g. 3DS Max, Maya, etc do it.

FWIW, here's a proper arc ball implementation. Try it vs. your favorite 3D software, and by God, implement it in yours:

(Demo requires mouse)

https://romankogan.net/math/arcball_js/index.html

Sure.

And why do you think that might be?

In other words, do you think policy changes have instantaneous effect on issues like unemployment, or perhaps they take some time?

Not entirely unreasonable.

Now, if only they had the brains to realize that the economy during the current term was shaped by the decisions made in the previous term.

Cue Trump's 2nd term being propped up by everything Biden did to un-fuck Trump's 1st term.

Everything else is blasphemy.

After that, Pascal = Delphi (for quite a while).

The fact that both are commercial, closed-source (and, in case of Delphi, quite pricey) packages is pretty much the sole reason Pascal lost out in popularity to languages that mere mortals could use at home without having to resort to piracy.

It took Embarcadero over a decade to realize that offering a free "Community Edition" of the IDE is a must to stay relevant. It was too late by then.

This is a false dichotomy. Pascal compiles fast and runs fast.

Then there's the fact that performance of a program depends on far more things than the language it's written in — and faster iteration cycles ease optimization and profiling on the level of algorithms, which is where you have most gains.

Squeezing that potential 3% speed up from using another language is rarely worth it then.

Not because you're wrong.

But because I'm in this picture and I don't like it, and I just found out that "boomer millennial" is a fitting descriptor.

Goddamit.

Just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying this point.

Newspaper Headline:

Discoverer of Underground Smuggling Ring Proven a Fraud: Ring Leader Says He Discovered It First"

1. Reddit's default sorting algorithm was (and perhaps still is) based on this

2. Google's internal Q&A tool, Dory[1], used it to rank questions to ask to the leadership during the "open" mic sessions.

NOTE: please don't do the same mistake.

The math of the algorithm ensures that controversial questions never get asked, since the algorithm approximated the upvotes/downvotes ratio, not votes/views ratio.

The latter was not used because, IIRC, counting impressions on an internal site was too "technically challenging".

This, in my opinion, defies the entire point of an internal Q&A, which is to address hot topics before they spill out and become an issue.

(I don't think I'm spilling any tea talking about how Q&A in Google was run five years ago; there's no secret sauce there. It was natural to ask "which questions make it to the top", and the answer was the link to the article we're discussing. Google considered it to be fair).

[1] https://support.google.com/dory/answer/9254865?hl=en

Sometimes I wonder whether it's worth to write anything of this sort, or am I screaming into the void.

Your comment makes it absolutely worth it.

Nah.

Smartphone cameras stopped being shitty a while ago, long before AI and computational photography hacks.

What you mean to say is they without AI, you'd know sooner that the smartphone maker put a cheap, shitty camera in your "premium" phone.

>People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.

Yeah, it's also fake image generation featuring humans with a funny number of fingers.

What AI isn't is a camera.

Perhaps because cowardice prevented you from stating your point clearly, so instead you resorted to vague implications in the form of a question.

A fine tactic which gives the coward a plausible deniability defense when their bullshit is called out: I didn't say that, you said that.

Coupled with other similar techniques, e.g.:

* You know what I mean

* Questions that have actual answers, but are asked rhetorically to make an implication: How many cats are eaten alive each year by immigrants?

* Both-sidesing/false balance (giving equal weight to contradicting points of view, regardless of what the reality has to say)

* Ambiguous implication that can be taken in many ways, depending on how the asker defines the terms: Do you really think the immigrants are helping the economy?

* Non-sequiturs and non-answers

* False dichotomies

* Etc

...this gives the coward a superpower to start a heated discussion, where the coward never actually says anything directly.

Instead, the opponents exert an enormous effort to debunk each leaf on the tree of possible interpretations of the coward's incomplete thought, effectively doing the thinking for the coward in a futile attempt to nail down what point the coward intended to make.

(There is no such clear point, other than I am right and you are wrong).

By the time it becomes clear that no possible interpretation is supported by reality, the coward silently leaves the discussion, and says the same exact things elsewhere, feeling empowered by having made others frustrated.

That frustration counts as a victory in an argument in coward's view, with the assumption that it comes from inability to counter the coward's (unstated, vague, implied) points.

In reality, it's infuriating to have to be made guessing what the other person wants to say, doubly so when they are the one forcing to play that game, which, miraculously, you always seem to lose, because the outcome is invariably "that's not quite what I'm saying" (and what the coward is saying is never directly stated by the coward).

At the same time, this protects the coward from being riduculed for any of the views they're promulgating in the discussion.

This is why the coward never states the views directly, and instead e.g. "presents questions side by side".

If the coward were to say outright "Unlike CD players, there's actually no clear way to say whether vaccines work or not", the coward would be laughed out of the room, and they know it — which is why the resort to implications and rhetorical questions about coward's motivation.

I hope this fully answers the question asked.