Pica is eating things that are not food, but as pointed out in the article I linked, eating dog poo is providing a significant source of nutrition for foxes. In those circumstances, it by definition is not pica.

Pet dogs also eat poo on occasion, also without any underlying problem, so I really don’t think there’s any reason to think that far less domesticated species where it is well established would just stop. I’m sure you can reduce it, especially if it has a nicer food source, but still, an animal with far less history of domestication seems like a recipe for amplification of all the potential issues you don’t want to deal with.

That is a reason for arguing that people don’t always make smart choices. It is however not an argument for claiming how people vote does not show what their preference is at the time of voting, which is what is relevant here.

It’s perfectly fine to argue you think it’s stupid of people to want to read about Musk, but the votes clearly show they do in fact want to.

Rabies isn’t much of a problem in the UK thankfully. But in general, yeah, Rabies is horrifying and it’s good advice.

EDIT: For anyone anywhere where it’s a risk: Be careful and make damn sure to seek advice if bitten, even if not obviously penetrating the skin and even if the animal is not obviously rabid (Reminder: Rabies is near 100% fatal with treatment if you don’t get vaccinated soon enough after exposure). Do not fuck with Rabies.

Yeah, foxes are best enjoyed from a distance, in my opinion. I’m perfectly happy with having them visit, but they can stay outside.

To the “they smell bad” bit, I’ll add two things:

1. I have pictures (maybe I’ll post some, despite the ick factor) where this fox laid down to sleep right next to a pillow it had shit all over. And we’re not talking pebbles, we’re talking the runs and it was a nightmare to clean. It was tempting to burn the thing… I also have to clean massive piles of fox poop off the decking on a regular basis.

2. There is this: Dog poo forms a significant part of foxes’ diet

Of course, one captive-bred will likely be better, but I absolutely agree with you they won’t make great pets.

They are cute, but frankly, that is just about sufficient to let me tolerate them sleeping in the gazebo and thoroughly washing stuff afterward, but not nearly sufficient to make me consider one as a pet.

No, the antics of a tech company owner are not relevant to a technology sub.

The votes prove you wrong, no matter what your opinion on it is. You’re free to disagree, but the notion that the people who make up this community are not the arbiters of what is and is not relevant to a community flies directly in the face of the very foundation Lemmy is built on.

How he picks his nose doesn’t matter. How he runs a tech company and how he affects people working in tech does.

And the popular answer does equal the right answer when the question is “does this community think this question is relevant to this community?” The votes are literally this community telling you whether or not it thinks that is true.

Or, you know, seeing as you guys are the ones being downvoted into the negative, you could take your own advice and start your own Elon-free tech community. Nothing is stopping you.

Funny thing is it’s not a proper lake, and not very old. It’s an artificial basin that was originally prepared to allow for control of the height of a canal dug all the way from the Thames a few miles away, for transport. But they finished it not long before the railway came, and it went bankrupt, and the canal path itself was sold off to a railway company and is now the path of one of the main London rail lines. As a result there are roads near me, nowhere near water, named things like Towpath Way and Canal Walk.

The reality of course, is that the reason they want to go after the IRS is because they don’t wan’t them to be able to afford to go after the big fish.

Labeling media with their significant owners and affiliations of board members would be a great thing. As long as it’d be uniformly applied… And as you’ve implied, that would certainly be unlikely to happen…

It’s wildly unrealistic but also pointless, because nothing stops us from building new services on top of the existing net. See also: Lemmy, Mastodon etc.

Convincing “regular people” to move is the hard part.

Frankly, I’ve seen it more often from Emacs users themselves, including while I used it myself for ~20+ years.

My own. My Emacs config grew over years to several thousand lines, and it got to a point where I decided I could write an editor in fewer lines that it took to configure Emacs how I liked it. It’s … not for everyone. I’m happy with it, because it does exactly only the things I want it to, and nothing else, but it does also mean getting used to quirks you can’t be bothered to fix, and not getting to blame someone else when you run into a bug.

That said, writing your own editor is easier than people think, as long as you leverage libraries for whichever things you don’t have a pressing need to customize (e.g. mine is written in Ruby, and I use Rouge for syntax highlighting, and I believe Rouge is more lines of code than the editor itself thanks to all the lexers)

As the old (bad) joke goes: Emacs is a great operating system. Shame it lacks a good editor.

The foxes are still more shy here for the most part. They’ll run if I open the door or if they see me move too much inside, while the cats will sometimes come to me and some of them (that one in particular) will come inside. But the gazebo is too tempting for both cats and foxes when I’m not out there.

That’s true. It’s been an issue near me as well. Thankfully in the most built up parts of London the foxes seems to mostly have enough food to not be particularly interested in cats. But I always keep an eye out when I see the cats here get close to foxes in case it turns nasty (not happened so far).

Other sources that are public domain or “cheap enough” for OpenAI to simply buy them. Hence my point that OpenAI is already worth enough that they could make a takeover offer for Reuters.

The thing, is realistically it won’t make a difference at all, because there are vast amounts of public domain data that remain untapped, so the main “problematic” need for OpenAI is new content that represents up to data language and up to date facts, and my point with the share price of Thomson Reuters is to illustrate that OpenAI is already getting large enough that they can afford to outright buy some of the largest channels of up-to-the-minute content in the world.

As for authors, it might wipe a few works by a few famous authors from the dataset, but they contribute very little to the quality of an LLM, because the LLM can’t easily judge during training unless you intentionally reinforce specific works. There are several million books published every year. Most of them make <$100 in royalties for their authors (an average book sell ~200 copies). Want to bet how cheap it’d be to buy a fully licensed set of a few million books? You don’t need bestsellers, you need many books that are merely sufficiently good to drag the overall quality of the total dataset up.

The irony is that the largest benefactor of content sources taking a strict view of LLMs will be OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the few others large enough to basically buy datasets or buy companies that own datasets because this creates a moat for those who can’t afford to obtain licensed datasets.

The biggest problem won’t be for OpenAI, but for people trying to build open models on the cheap.