Thanks for sharing. The default launcher on my phone is terrible and I hate having to move to different layouts every time I switch phones (which only happens every 5+ years, but is still annoying) so I have been using Nova for many years.

Just turned off its internet access on both data and wifi, let’s see if it complains about it.

As a note: I can see that it only transfered a few hundred kilobytes in the past month, which isn’t a lot, but it’s still more than zero.

Likely NT here, but meditation is awesome. Sometimes when I am particularly stressed or overwhelmed it’s kinda hard to get in the right state of mind, it’s as if I forget how easy it is to meditate, but when it does click it makes everything that much more simple.

Highly recommended to anyone going through rough times or even people who are fine but would like to have their brain shut up for a little while.

Correct me if I’m wrong, I didn’t follow EU politics at the time of the last election, but didn’t she campaign on green-deal policies for her first term? I remember reading about this somewhere. So moving away from that and closer to ECR would be quite the shift.

LMAO. As much as restrictions of this kind suck, at least DNS makes more sense than IP without any transparency.

It really does sound like whoever came up with the IP solution had no idea of what the hell they were talking about.

I mean, you shouldn’t stay on here if you don’t like it, that goes without saying, but I think all in all the benefits outweight the few very annoying issues that this platform has. For instance, I think that the smaller number of people tend to mean that if you leave a comment somewhere you are likely to find someone to chat with and discuss whatever it is that you brought up in your comment.

Often times on Reddit there are so many comments that you either blow up getting over 20 replies or get forgotten and ignored. No inbetweens.

Do they? I think most of Lemmy still prefers online freedom, it should be one of the reasons that brought us here. Plus, the people you are gonna meet even by changing instance are going to be more or less the same. The number of instances you are barred from by staying on .world is pretty small.

One can hope…

You know, in a way I am glad that we managed to implement such a piss poor implementation of a PiRaCy ShIeLd. They are going to have to roll back or disable this piece of crap in a matter of days and that will hopefully be the end of these silly internet restrictions for good.

Had the implementation not sucked ass this bad, we would have needed to wait for some EU infringiment procedure or ECJ order to shut it down. Instead, this way it’s gonna end way more quickly.

That ban has been in place since about as long as smartphones have been a thing. And even regardless of the national ban, generally school forbade them as a local policy.

Doesn’t change the fact that nothing will happen if the teacher doesn’t act. So TL;DR nothing will change, it will remain up to the teacher like it already was.

His work in eradicating gang violence was impressive, I get why the few Salvadorians who aren’t behind bars would vote for him. Although I can’t help but wonder about how many people might have gotten unjustly incarcerated because of how much power he’s given to the police.

I see. Well, I for one, think TikTok is definitely worse than Twitter because of its addictive nature, little user agency (you have almost no freedom of picking your own content, you are basically in the algorithm’s hands) and serious privacy concerns.

Twitter is by no means a great platform, it’s just that TikTok is SO BAD that it’s actually hard to beat it in terms of shittiness.

Why would that be weird? Which platform would you have preferred (other than Mastodon, I guess)?

I have read about this procedure yesterday and it was also on twitter, from the account of the Commission.

Like others have said I am a bit concerned by the privacy implications, but I like how nice the model is. Defintiely wouldn’t consider it as an alternative to therapy or even real conversations (the sentences it generates look very fake at times, plus I wouldn’t want to trust a machine’s advice anyway), but it’s pleasant to talk to and that’s probably all that matters.

Great if you have some time to kill or maybe need someone to take your head off something you’ve been thinking too much about, just gotta be careful on what you reveal to him.

EDIT: as I was chatting I got a prompt asking me to log in to continue the conversation. I logged in with my Google account, then kept going for a bit, then singned off and closed the conversation. After I told him I was going to close the tab he greeted me with my real name without me ever have mentioned it in the convo (of course, he took it from Google), but it still weirded the heck out of me. Be careful with what you share lol.

I am no expert either, but I once trained and ran an AI chat bot of my own. With a decently powerful Nvidia GPU it could output a message every 20-ish seconds (which is still too slow if you want to keep the conversation at a decent pace). I also tried it without a GPU, just running on my CPU (on a PC that had an AMD GPU which is about the same as not having one for ML applications) and it was of course noticeably slower. About 3 minutes per message, give or take.

And bear in mind, this was with an old and comparatively tiny model, something like Pi would be much more demanding, the replies my model produced hardly made any sense most of the times.

Correct, but that review process won’t have any votes on it, meaning it also won’t be possible for Hungary (or anyone else) to veto it. Doesn’t seem like that great of an accomplishment on Hungary’s side.

Possible. I’d love it if they actually went through with the article 7 threats, but until then using said threat to have Orban sit down is the next best thing.

News outlet are being extremely vague about Orban’s motives, but it’s clear that no funds have been unfrozen. By the looks of it, it seems Hungary received no grants at all and just changed its mind out of the goodness of her heart, which is weird.

From DW

“From what we are hearing from our sources, they made it very clear to Viktor Orban that he is standing all alone in the EU, blocking this essential aid for Ukraine,” she said, adding that following the message it became clear Orban would finally say yes and so the EU leaders sat together to finalize the deal.

This makes me wonder if anything went on behind those closed doors. We know that yesterday Orban met with Meloni, who according to euronews

[Meloni] has fashioned herself as the most dexterous mediator between Budapest and Brussels. Meloni and Orbán held bilateral talks on Wednesday evening in anticipation of the high-stakes meeting.

All that’s left to hope is that Meloni and other EU leaders succesfully managed to scare off Hungary and that no backroom deals went on.

I can agree with that. Something that looked particularly bad was von der Leyen openly supporting Israel, in contrast with what had been decided by the rest of the EU institutions. Basically she took initiative and used her position to support her own agenda rather than the one agreed upon by the institution she was representing. (source, albeit soft paywalled)

A more direct approach in foreign policy is sorely needed for our continent, but I think we are still going to have to wait a few years before we can see it.

Quickly? By EU standards, I suppose, but this is the furthest thing from “quick” in the real world. We are about a month late compared to the UK and the USA.

but they can’t do the minimum decent thing and say “we condemn Israel’s atrocities” in the UN

The EU is a permanent observer in the UN and as such doesn’t have any voting rights. The common foreign policy is decided by the Council and requires unanimity so every member state has veto power. As such it’s practically impossible to come to a conclusive decision on divisive matters such as the current Gaza conflict.

Ok so first off, thank you for typing out a well thought argument.

I posted a summed up version of the five ways, rather than the full text, and now I realize that probably was a mistake. I just wanted to make sure people would have read it, most would have ignored a wall of text. Instead, I will directly quote the full text in my answers here.

Here is a TL;DR, cause this will be long:

Thus beginning a long standing religious tradition of using scientific rhetoric where its helpful and attempting to shoehorn philosophy in where it contradicts or fails to uphold.

I don’t think he tried to use scientific rethoric at all, nor that any philosophical shoehorning has happened. Rather, it’s entirely philosophy. Doesn’t mean it’s perfect or necessarily correct, but we gotta call it the way it is. I also think you might be trying a bit too hard to interpret it as science, while that’s not really what the Summa was meant to be. Some of your conclusions were drawn from the summary I posted not being accurate (sorry about that, btw) and I adressed them by quoting the full text.

Starting from the fourth way:

Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

You correctly criticized his mistake in using fire as the source of maximum heat and mixing in scientifical evidence with philosophy, but the full text tells a more nuanced story.
Fire here is more of an example, rather than pure scientifical evidence. It’s also not the basis of the point he is adressing here. That would instead be more abstract (and wouldn’t you know it, philosophical) concepts like “good” and “true”. So while your discussion on splitting natural sciences and philosophy makes a lot of sense, I don’t think it applies here.

Onto the fifth way:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

In truth, I think this is the most beautiful of the five ways and the one that, to me,makes the most sense from a scientific perspective. I remained of the opinion that Aquinas wasn’t trying to bring in natural sciences into this one, but since you brought up “modern scientifical understanding” I will do my best to make some sense of it, according to modern science.

The message here is not as easy as water flowing because of gravity. It’s also not as easy as “what was before the Big Bang?”, because that would be, like you said, vulnerable to the “God of the gaps” counter argument.
Rather, starting from the universal constants such as the Boltzmann constant which regulates all of thermodinamycs; the speed of light in a vacuum, which regulates all existing radiation or the gravitational constant, which regulates how all matter and time interact; through science we get a very clear picture of how many pieces needed to fall into place for reality as we know it to come together, let alone life to be possible. According to this modern interpretation, the fifth way states that in order for the universe to exist as we know it, defined according to these specific constants, it must have happened through a higher being, a creator. Here, actually, is the only place where I see a possible mistake, because on a logical level he doesn’t prove definitively that the existence of God is the only solution to the problem, the hypothesis of a coincidence remains on the table. However I personally think, when put in this perspective, the religious hypothesis remains the more believable one.

On your last point, I don’t see how the fifth way would violate what he has established from the first way. The fifth claims that motion of inanimate objects happens naturally and repeatedly because of “some intelligent being […] [whom] we call God”. The first instead says that God was the first who put everything in motion, and that because of that things have been kept in motion ever since the universe began. I think these two point go hand in hand, rather than being opposed:
God first created the universe, by putting things in motion. God also defined the patters according to which things should have moved after his initial “push”. This makes perfect sense to me.