With each one of Trump's announced appointments, it looks like the situation in the Federal government is getting worse. Even before the gutting of our Federal agencies occurs, we're still dealing with the court system stripping away sound policies both at the highest levels and in backward districts, often seeming to come down to a decision by a single judge in Texas.

So what can we do in states that actually want to make things better to either work on our own or even begin to pull away from the decision making of the backward parts of our country that keep making these decisions for us? How can we act without their input? How can we pull back the money that blue states that are doing well funnel into red states that could scarcely afford paved roads without our tax dollars? Is pulling out of the US or creating a smaller state-to-state coalition to consolidate our collective financial power reasonable or possible?

In Massachusetts we have a ballot initiative process, but it takes years to get it together to get a question on a ballot, and by then we're likely to be much further down this road.

What can we do today? How do we petition our representatives to pull us out of this absolute mess as much as possible? How do we maintain the protections, freedoms, and quality of life that our own local and state governments and the voters that put them into power have signaled their desire to secure in the face of a Federal government where RFK decides the health care policy and Elon Musk literally gets his own meme department?

Using the formulas from corollary 1 of Aronow and Green [2013], we find that untreated compliers have an implied turnout rate of 66.88%, whereas treated compliers have an implied turnout rate of 78.48%. Given the high base rate of voting among compliers in this study, it is interesting that friend-to-friend appeals elevated turnout so profoundly.

The results of this study suggest that simply talking to your friends, even just through a text message, is far more likely to get them to go out and vote than organized but impersonal voter mobilization. If you want to secure the outcome of the election, text or call your friends about it, especially your friends in swing states. Moreover, encourage them to do the same. If a text will increase their voter participation, it'll probably also get a decent number of them to send a similar text themselves.

Gloom and doom is not going to win the election. Endless panicked articles are not going to win the election. People going out and voting will, and you, person reading this, have the power to get more people to go vote.

It will do more than a century of posting on Lemmy would.

In the past few weeks I feel like I've seen a lot more conservative comments being posted on Beehaw. Where before it seemed like occasionally some dazed right-winger would wander through now and then, it now seems a bit more like they specifically show up to any thread that brushes up against one of their pet issues.

The most recent example I've noticed is around the stuff with the Ladybird devs being weird about being asked to use inclusive pronouns, but it seems like a pattern.

Has anyone else noticed this? Any thoughts on a course of action other than blocking them all individually or reporting particularly grievous examples?

I really would be disappointed to see every single thread here slowly inundated with pettiness and hate.

For years I was using Drupe, but they've thoroughly enshittified. What used to be a sleek, extremely functional dialer app with a fantastic UI has become a slow, ad-filled sack of garbage with a still pretty good UI.

A few months back I had enough and I switched to FOSS Dialer. The biggest thing on my radar was looking for something that isn't prone to being turned to adware garbage for a quick quarterly profit, so it seemed like a good fit.

But in the past few months I've probably made more accidental calls in a single week than in the years that I used Drupe. It's super obnoxious. Click once, and I call some random person. When I open my phone it literally just starts at the top of my contact list.

Drupe was great because I could arrange which frequent numbers I wanted to use in which order along the left side of my screen and calling or texting just required me to drag it over to a spot on the right side of my screen. I could call people without looking at my phone, I hardly ever called the wrong number or accidentally dialed someone, and it was really comfortable and easy to use. If it hadn't turned to a bloated piece of crap I'd have used it forever.

So my question: is there anything more along the lines of Drupe in terms of UI that is at least not at the moment packed full of ads, slow as hell, and collecting all sorts of data? I've kinda had it up to here with FOSS Dialer.

I've been looking more seriously at making a permanent switch to Linux, as I don't plan to ever upgrade to Windows 11. I'm currently running a dual-boot with Ubuntu Studio, and I've been trying to piece together everything I need to move my regular usage over.

I think I've got enough of a grasp of Jack at this point to replace Voicemeeter, which was one of my big hurdles. The next, though, is Discord's incomplete functionality.

For those who don't know, audio doesn't stream with screen sharing over discord on Linux. I do a lot of streaming with friends, so we kind of need this functionality.

I know it's possible to run a discord client on Linux that fixes this problem, but given that it's technically against the ToS, I don't really want to risk my account. I have a bunch of stuff set up for game servers, including all sorts of webhooks and ticket tool configurations and the like, so it isn't really worth risking.

I know there are some VLC plugins I can use to stream video files, but that doesn't help if I'm trying to stream a game or my DAW.

Has anyone found solutions that work for them? The easier for the person I'm streaming to, the better.

Archive Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240330224149/https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

This is fascinating. I've certainly seen AI hallucinating things like imaginary functions in gdscript. Admittedly, it does it a lot more with gpt3 than with gpt4 on a subscription, which is consistent with what 3 vs 4 has access to, but I'm sure the problems apply in a lot of other use cases that might have not had the benefit of more recent documentation.

I suppose it's not surprising that a number of larger entities have been falling prey to this, as they keep trying to inappropriately jam AI into their production lines where it's incapable of doing the job. Pretty clever vulnerability to find, though.

Ultimately, this is probably a good thing for human coders, imo. The more LLMs demonstrate that they're not effective without robust human intervention, the better.

I love this thing. Pick a key, it shows you where the scale is. One octave or whole fretboard, with notes or without. This makes learning scales and just picking a scale and composing in it so much easier!

A couple of months ago I started looking at composing some music for a game I'm working on. I started fiddling around with DAWs with just mouse and keyboard and a few weeks later I picked up a little 2 octave MIDI-keyboard to make it a little easier. That lead to diving into music theory, which made me want to pick up a bass.

A few weeks later and a couple of cheapo guitars, and I feel like I've found an essential part of myself. I could literally sit here playing bass until my arms go numb. I don't even have my audio interface or an amp yet, I'm literally just playing it dry, and I'm absolutely in love. I can't wait for my interface to get here so I can start putting down just like, some bass lines and some simple power chords with some distortion.

It's incredible how cheap it is to pick up a couple of instruments now and just dive right into music. With all the stuff on various instruments and music theory out there, why not? Nobody's going to gasp in awe at the quality of my pair of Glarrys, but it's plenty to get my fingers moving and let the music find its way out.

Anyway, that's really all. I'm in love with bass and with how accessible music is. I kind of want to try violin. Or like, maybe a shamisen. I feel like instruments used to be so prohibitively expensive, even on the beginner end, and that seems to be much less the case now. Like, it also certainly seems like you could easily spend as much money as you might feel like spending on music stuff, but I actually feel like I can pick some different stuff up and try things without like selling my organs.

While we're here, any recommendations for resources on getting further into music theory or composition? There's so much out there, I'm sure there's some great stuff I haven't even brushed up against yet!

I was trying to do a memory test to see how far back 3.5 could recall information from previous prompts, but it really doesn't seem to like making pseudorandom seeds. 😆