Deebster

To save sending the tree every time, we could just have a fixed layout of letters and symbols. This would have the advantage that we could put them in order, which would be easier to work with.

I wonder what they found.

Apple reverse engineered a file format, Beeper reverse engineered a protocol.

Microsoft made several changes to try to keep Apple out, Apple's also made several changes to keep Beeper out, except now everyone's online so it's happening way faster.

It's not exactly the same kind of reverse engineering, but I never said it was. I think you've got a very narrow definition of reverse engineering in your head and you're quibbling over me using it more broadly than you would.

You're being unnecessarily pedantic. Apple was blocking interoperability and reverse engineering found a solution—and Apple is blocking that solution.

You're right - but, as Cory Doctorow points out, Apple owe their success to reverse engineering, the very thing they're busy blocking now.

Yeah, that's what I mean by transcriptions; if you're mostly posting screenshots of social media posts then it'd probably work quite well, but if it's photos you're definitely going to need something more complicated.

Interesting/useful bits:

• The term “climate change” was initially popularized by Republicans under G.W. Bush as they wanted a softer term that sounded less “frightening”. It's a better term though, because it covers non-temperature effects like ocean acidification.
• A warmer atmosphere means more water can be held in the air, which leads to more rain (often more extreme) but also more droughts as warmer air can remove more water from an area.
• The fact that the climate has (slowly) changed in the past doesn't mean we aren't causing change now. The faulty logic is akin to People have died of cancer in the past; therefore, cigarettes don’t cause cancer now.
• NOAA projects 3.5 feet to 7 feet sea-level rise along America’s coastlines by 2100.
• Unsurprisingly, windmills aren't driving whales “a little batty”. Also, wind farms are responsible for just 0.03% of all human-related bird deaths in the U.S. and onshore wind is one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity.
• The primary reason the US Army wants to electrify its fighting vehicles is to reduce wartime casualties (no need for refuelling missions and electric is stealthier due to being quieter and cooler).

I feel that auto-generated descriptions are going to generally be terrible, even with the new GPT AIs. There's too much context needed to do a good job to be able to just feed an image into some code and get something useful.

On the other hand, transcriptions should be able to be done more accurately, particularly with a bit of extra logic to recognise forms like Twitter posts.

Some database of alt-texts might be possible by scraping for alt-texts and transcriptions from the fediverse, reddit, etc, but a quick search didn't come up with anything.

It's not the same expression. I mean "a bug" as in a software error and "on my side" as in it's not Lemmy's fault.

Now I see that OP is the creator of the tumblr clone Wafrn I'm sure it's just a typo and that this is the intended meaning.

I thought that, and nearly didn't read the article, but it's really interesting - and useful to have these refutations to anyone who trots out these lies/distortions when talking to you.

Not that arguing with facts is actually going to change their mind, but at least you can feel good about winning the argument!

edit: I posted some notes as a top-level comment

Or "a bug on my side", depending on what they mean. Prepositions are hard.

It's been downvoted because it was posted multiple times (misunderstanding/technical error) but I agree. Each of the posts have different replies so it's a shame we can't merge them into one excellent thread.