FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

In the US, you can view a lot of BMI indicators as another way of saying "Lots of Black people fall into this category."

High BMI is associated with shorter life (Black people in the US have shorter lives. Because racism.).

People with high BMI are more likely to die from covid! (Black people are more likely to die from covid. Because we're exposed much more, and get worse care when we get it).

A lot of what you're seeing is the medical outcomes of systemic racism.

Let's start with the racist origins of BMI, and the lies it enables. BMI was devised by a racist non-doctor named Jaques Quetelet. He was trying to find the ideal man proportions to "study criminality." It was basically phrenology for the rest of the body. 🤡

He came up with his ideal European proportions.

This was during the golden age of "race science," when otherwise intelligent European people wasted lots of time trying to use math and science to justify their unjustifiable evil.

They try to explain the obesity paradox away, by saying confounding variables, like smoking, environmental exposure to carcinogens, access to healthcare, bone density and muscle mass. I mean, yes? Of course that's all true.

Which is all a fancy way of saying BMI is not as correlated to health or longevity as any of these better indicators.🤡

If you want to know if someone has diabetes, test their blood. Don't measure their height and weight and then try to guess based on that. That's silly.

Wordpress advertises that you can customize the look of email newsletters, but I couldn’t find settings for that — so I wrote support. They replied and said actually, no, there are no settings for that.

But first, their AI Support Bot took a crack at an answer — and absolutely, confidently hallucinated two settings that don’t actually exist. I thought I was losing my mind because they just weren’t there.

That feels worse than just not replying at all, right?

i've been trying to figure out why some people prefer merge and some people prefer rebase. I feel like there must be some systematic reasons, like "people in situation X tend to prefer rebase, people in situation Y tend to prefer merge”

my only thought so far is that small short-lived changes work well with rebase, and longer-lived branches are maybe better to merge

(not looking for explanations of why you think rebase/merge is better here or why the people who disagree with you are wrong)

i've done it.

DO NOT HIRE COYOTE LANDSCAPING INC.
I caught this coyote at work on my neighbor's garden this morning, and she is NOT LICENSED.
AVOID.
⭐ 1/5

https://youtu.be/yqxC2m5-GBQ

@eniko with thanks to @foone

It's a truth universally acknowledged that if you google a subject and scroll down far enough, you'll find some "Foone" punk talking about it on twitter.

this is twice as annoying when it happens to me

not many people know this but kyon from haruhi is actually the original sigma male #光ハルヒHoliday 17

Hilbert curve + rolling cube

If I installed new server software that served websites 500% faster but also crashed sometimes, your first question would be "how frequent are the crashes?" and if I shrugged you'd back away slowly and start looking for my replacement.

But with LLMs & hallucinations that's just normal operating conditions and you're a luddite if you ask too much about it.

A very insightful talk!
"FireShonks 2023 - Chat Control: Mass Screenings, Massive Dangers"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Gi5mEFSq8

#whataweekhuh