“No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them. Or, at the very least, that wasn’t the only thing. My entanglement comes from how a carpet is made of so many threads that I can’t resign myself to following just one; my ensnarement comes from how one story is made of many stories. And I can’t even tell them all— a more truthful word could from echo to echo cause my highest glaciers to crumble down the precipice.” - Clarice Lispector
- 48 Posts
- 146 Comments
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•Poland is now among the world's 20 largest economies. How it happenedEnglish
18·6 days agoI feel like a good chunk of it is that Poland was hit with by the first decisive punch thrown in WW2 so it isn’t remembered as powerful like other European nations involved in WW2… which leads people to be surprised when Poland appears to become a major power “out of nowhere.”
People readily assume Germany is the European military industrial heavyweight in Europe because of the stereotype of Germany as powerful while not factoring in the fact that any country hit first in the outbreak of a world war such as WW2 is going to be taken out of the fight if there isn’t an immediate international response. Poland was and is an industrial powerhouse, if that is surprising to people I think that is because people are lazy about their stereotypes.
Poland made the fourth-largest troop contribution in Europe,[124][125][126] and its troops served both the exiled government in the west and Soviet leadership in the east. Polish troops played an important role in the Normandy, Italian, North African Campaigns and Netherlands and are particularly remembered for the Battle of Britain and Battle of Monte Cassino.[127][128] Polish intelligence operatives proved extremely valuable to the Allies, providing much of the intelligence from Europe and beyond,[129] Polish code breakers were responsible for cracking the Enigma cipher and Polish scientists participating in the Manhattan Project were co-creators of the American atomic bomb. In the east, the Soviet-backed Polish 1st Army distinguished itself in the battles for Warsaw and Berlin.[122]
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•Gibraltar dumping all of its raw sewage into MediterraneanEnglish
4·8 days agoThe area is supposed to be protected for wildlife but often there are “wet wipes and plastic pollution entangled in algae and all over the rocks”, said Lewis Stagnetto, of the Nautilus Project, a local environmental charity.
Raw sewage pollution can trigger toxic algal blooms that strip oxygen from the water, choking aquatic life. It exposes fish and mammals to a cocktail of chemicals and plastics that can disrupt reproduction and damage health, and puts people at risk by spreading pathogens and antibiotic-resistant genes.
I believe any person or country incurs an inescapable debt they must pay back when environmental damage is done by unnecessary environmental harm that is reasonably preventable, no matter where on earth that impact happens.
The losses to the productivity of fisheries and related industries is huge and things like this place entire ecosystems that sustain landscapes under threat.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•What happens when Reddit actually dies/ start being 90% bots?
5·8 days agoThen the people who want to own and strangle things will shift their focus to other centralized chokepoints like Bluesky and Lemmy.World.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•Ukrainian drones may hit Moscow Victory Day parade, Zelenskyy warnsEnglish
9·10 days agoI think the most impactful thing Ukraine could do here is join the parade with some drones. It would embarass the shit out of russians until they could get rid of the drones and would be a psychological win.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•German government's approval ratings slide to 11%, poll findsEnglish
32·10 days agoThe problem is probably that y’all are being too kind to immigrants, try being crueler to them!
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca•Are krakens basically giant squids?
6·13 days agoI would argue The Colossal Squid is the Kraken but I guess Giant Squids and Colossal Squids tie here.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca•What instruments require the player to basically "create" the pitch?
4·14 days agoAny instrument where the pitch is not quantized into steps by design.
Guitars do this with frets, though there are of course fretless guitars but the problem is the quantization of pitch/fretted strength length that frets provides allows complex chords to be played in tune. This is functionally impossible to do on a fretless stringed instrument and is why violin type instruments mostly play single notes or two paired notes.
A classic church organ is the bridge between the world of quantized pitch instruments and instruments where pitch is constructed as part of each note. Each pipe produces a sine wave at a determined pitch.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•Merz suggests Ukraine may have to accept territorial loss to help pave way for EU membershipEnglish
2·16 days agoThe US also still sends quite a bit of aid to Ukraine despite Trump and his fellow criminals doing everything they can to sabotage it for Putin. No matter what Trump does, the fact remains that most people in the US are neutral to positive about Ukraine and see Trump’s blatant attempts to sabotage Ukraine as yet more proof of the fact that Trump is full of shit and Putin is his daddy.
I am not convinced Merz could get away with NOT giving Ukraine a ton of military help, I don’t think that is probably a politically tenable move in Germany if you want to form a majority coalition… so people like Merz undermine help in other ways that are less easy to pin on them negatively… like helping manufacture an architecture of military intel and personnel that makes it easy for rightwing elements of Germany to feed technology, doctrine and intelligence to russia or at least place it in places that are so easy for russia to get that it is basically a gift.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•Merz suggests Ukraine may have to accept territorial loss to help pave way for EU membershipEnglish
132·16 days agoBecause Merz and the far right in Germany are decidely on russia/Putin’s side?
What has Merz done as actions that demonstrate he actually wants Ukraine to win?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•Merz suggests Ukraine may have to accept territorial loss to help pave way for EU membershipEnglish
9·16 days agoKind of reminds me of how people breed and raise show dogs… and not in a good, normal well adjusted way.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•Merz suggests Ukraine may have to accept territorial loss to help pave way for EU membershipEnglish
13·16 days agoDid Merz not get bullied enough as a kid or something?
How did he turn into a human ingrown toenail?
Why do I feel the need to give Merz a swirly so bad?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•71 years without a military strategy, Germany just wrote oneEnglish
2·20 days agoNo and I didn’t mean to imply that if I did.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•71 years without a military strategy, Germany just wrote oneEnglish
84·20 days agoLol you don’t think Merz and his rightwing coalition form an extremist rightwing threat?
The center right is hopeless to stop the far right even if they weren’t lying about wanting to rein them in.
Merz only leads to Trump like figures, so yeah Trump is worse, but that isn’t much consolation?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•71 years without a military strategy, Germany just wrote oneEnglish
59·20 days agoDoes a rightwing extremist Germany with a powerful military seem like a good idea to you?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•71 years without a military strategy, Germany just wrote oneEnglish
613·21 days agoGermany HAS NOT impressed me with the way it has begun to wield this power.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•UK moves to ban smoking for everyone born after 2008English
12·21 days agoWhy would it be cooler for then?
Because they just became more illegal.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•UK moves to ban smoking for everyone born after 2008English
1·22 days agoDo you honestly think they aren’t going to do that?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•UK moves to ban smoking for everyone born after 2008English
146·22 days agoThe best way to make cigarettes cool to kids is to make them fully illegal, this is a nonsense law unless you are trying to increase the amount of kids smoking cigarettes.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzto
Europe@feddit.org•Merz says he is maintaining a good personal relationship with TrumpEnglish
81·24 days agoDon’t they agree on most things? Of course Merz must hate Trump for being loud and sloppy but aren’t their politics and policy goals entirely compatible?


















I am not a professional programmer but it seems to me that the idea that AI is needed to increase the firehose of code being written to “improve” programming and how well computers work is as absurd as the idea that the point of a university degree in a language is to increase the raw amount of words being written in that language.
The point is to convey ideas with language not produce more language, same thing with code, the point is to solve problems not produce ever larger and larger amounts of code with automation.
Something I know without a doubt is that for many people who love language, they desire a great deal less of the fake, hurtful, useless words that drown out the good ones. People who love words and work in crafting and shaping them tend to think it is inherently good to shape useful words not just mindlessly produce combinations of words in as great a volume possible.
To put it in a more abstracted fashion, relying on AI to produce more and more code faster and faster feels like a Jazz musician saying they rely on AI to fill in all the empty spaces they leave between notes with complementary embelleshing notes. The point of a jazz musician is clearly not to produce the most notes possible, it is to convey meaning with notes.
To bring it back to a concrete example, how many times has Google built a new chat program/app from scratch and then abandoned it? Sure there is lots of code there of very high quality, an intimidating amount to be sure, but isn’t the primary job of the programmer here to say “hey, why don’t we stop writing new code from the ground up for every chat app a different part of the company wants and standardize it to a much smaller codebase with a set of customizations different parts of the company can apply to the same core chat program”?
It seems to me a good programmer would be good at framing problems from a perspective that requires as simple implementation in code as possible within reason, not be best at producing the program with the most lines of code fastest that still solves the problem.