CoderKat

Agree on your last sentence. I think one of the big problems is that women as a whole are disproportionately over sexualized and when they are sexualized, it tends to be a lot more blatant.

There absolutely are plenty of works of media where male and female characters are both sexualized. But there's also many where only the female characters are notably sexualized (or are so damn heavily sexualized that the sexualization of the male characters pales in comparison).

There's also the fact that things being made for men is so normalized that nobody bats an eye if a video game or movie only has prominent male characters. Society often treats such works as if they were gender neutral. But if you create a work that's all women, society tends to treat it as "for women only", toxic masculinity often treats such works as a no-go for men, and many people are much more critical towards them.

It doesn't even have to be as blatant as all characters being the same gender. In general, society tends to default to male dominated everything and can often even view being 50/50 as "women are taking over".

Even on the internet, people tend to default to male pronouns. Or when giving a hypothetical, they tend to default to male characters.

All these kinda things lead up to media that also skews for men.

Lol, same. I think I've always made the decision to like and/or subscribe in the middle of videos, usually when I've seen enough to conclude I want to see more.

I wonder, does YouTube have any stats they expose for what timestamp people like at? I'd actually be really curious to see a graph of that for some videos. It'd obviously be biased towards earliest good points, but it'd probably identify the best sections.

For the kinds of YouTubers I've been mostly watching, it's apparently Nebula, Curiosity Stream, and... Hello Fresh? That one's the odd one out for how often it shows up in sponsorships.

I'm often a little suspicious of companies I see too frequently in ads like that. It gives me the vibe that they are struggling to have any natural word of mouth spread and I wonder why. Nebula and Curiosity Stream I can understand since those are pretty niche products (subscriptions for people who enjoy educational videos). But Hello Fresh I also get offers in the mail every few weeks. They push hard to try them out and it makes me wonder what the catch is.

TLDR: want to program? Take an intro and an algorithms class first. I suggest you avoid video games or AI. Web or mobile apps are much more beginner/solo friendly.

As a professional software dev, I see this a lot in my field. Software is very approachable and frankly there is a lot you can just learn as you go along. But usually you still need a decent amount of fundamentals as well as domain knowledge to do that, especially if you want the code to be at all maintainable.

My biggest suggestion to anyone with programming aspirations is to take a step back and start with a basic course on the fundamentals (there's multiple MOOCs for this that are a good way to get that). Ideally then find a similar class or resource on algorithms and data structures, because those are just crucial for many projects, but more importantly they get you "thinking like a programmer". Having that analytical mindset is probably the best thing you can do to make winging it actually possible.

But even then, expectations need to be grounded. Eg, video games are by far the most common thing people want to create. But video games require a lot more math, can be performance critical, and perhaps most critically require you to have many other skills, too. It's one thing to be a good enough programmer, but you also need to make a lot of art.

Another is AI. You can totally learn to make AI stuff. There's so many frameworks, pre trained models, and easy to use cloud offerings for making custom models. The bigger concern with AI isn't simply writing code for it, but that modern AI is simply limited. The type of AI most people talk about is basically just prediction and categorization. It's only as good as the training data. Finding and cleaning data is very time consuming and often very boring. Some parts of this aren't very automatable and thus aren't truly programming tasks. So it's easy for an AI project to fail not because of any programming skills, but because of the limitations of modern AI.

My advice? Self contained web or mobile apps. Those are usually the most feasible for a single person and the most practical. Look at the various apps on your phone or that you see recommended online and consider if there's things you could do better or if you see niches that aren't covered. Or even just reinvent an app that already exists for fun. Not all projects have to actually be practical!

There's also technically the option of contributing to open source, but I think beginners will find that too difficult. A project you create yourself lets you know every line of code and keeps the project easy to understand. Big open source projects can be thousands of millions of lines of code where nobody understands it all and learning to read code is a skill that takes practice and experience.

We give copyright for much less.

I find this an interesting point. My understanding is that AI art just isn't considered enough work on the part of the human creator, presumably because of the idea that you only need to come up with a prompt.

But at the same time, most photographs and videos are copyrightable even if you literally just pointed your phone at whatever without any talent at all. IIRC, the idea of photographs being copyrighted was originally a controversial one, but these days is generally accepted. As long as a human took the photo (and not, say, a monkey, as a famous case found).

Is pointing a phone and clicking a button more of a human contribution than coming up with a prompt? What about if they had to iteratively tune the prompt and mask out parts of the image? In my book, I'd say that's more human contribution than many photographs.

Only thing I can think of is if you are developing a website or extension and need to make sure there isn't some subtle browser difference. Though since it uses the same engine as Chrome, that use case should be a lot more niche than it used to be.

Pretty much. Though also any security questions or other private info you have saved, some of which is much more annoying to protect.

Though one annoying thing is that even if you change everything, what they find might help them social engineer an attack.

I second Bitwarden, BTW. Best password manager I've used.

Similarly, I think it's dumb that places are always starting with decriminalization instead of legalization. Let's be honest. We all know why they do both of these things. They're scared of not appearing hard enough on "crime". They know that there's a ton of scared voters who associate drugs with bad things and they are afraid of losing those voters.

We see the same thing happening in countless places with marijuana, too. Despite many places having already proven that legalization works and does not, in fact, open a portal to hell.

If we accept that shrooms shouldn't be illegal, it doesn't make sense to keep them illegal for longer. Similarly, it doesn't make sense that it's still illegal to sell them. Like, are they expecting that they just magically appear in the hands of consumers? No, I think they know exactly what they're doing and it's all just catering to the older voters who scare easily.

I won't claim apartments are for everyone. There's no denying that you just cannot have the kind of yard that a detached or semi-detached house offers. At best, some apartments or neighbourhoods have community gardens and it's also more common that you'd have access to broader parks (which you can't garden in, but you can enjoy city managed gardens and generally have more space for activities).

I personally don't find privacy a concern with well made apartments. Well made ones have good sound isolation. I don't usually hear my neighbours. But admittedly not every apartment is well made.

You can buy apartments (usually in the form of a condo), so you can make certain kinds of improvements. Yeah, it's not quite the same level of customization (like windows as you mention). You certainly can make plumbing changes (e.g., if you want a nicer bathtub), though there may be some reasonable rules to protect the rest of the building from being flooded if you don't use a licensed professional.

Many modern apartments do have places to charge EVs. You'll probably pay extra for them, but they're likely to become the norm for every parking space as EVs become more prominent. But one of the biggest boons of apartments is not needing a car in the first place! With detached homes, you simply can't have everyone close enough together for efficient public transit. With apartments, you can live in desirable areas and close to high frequency transit stations without having to be rich.

Some newer apartments do have solar panels. I wouldn't be surprised if most people saved money on electricity with apartments, though. Home solar panels take a while to break even. Newer apartments usually have central boilers and chillers, which massively reduce the cost of heating and AC, which are very energy intensive.

Again, I won't claim it's for everyone. Some people really are better off dealing with the downsides of having a house (which typically will mean being far away from everything and either having to drive or having mediocre transit). But I would argue that for most people, the downsides of apartments are simply worth it. How many people actually want to change plumbing or windows? How many want to garden (beyond the amount a balcony allows)? Don't forget the benefits, too. Stuff like living in more desirable areas (especially where you no longer need a car -- that's a massive expense removed), having amenities like a gym, pool, or rec room, if renting, not having to deal with maintenance, and better views.

I'm also not sure how well off you are, but honestly, for many people of my generation, the only way they can afford a place to live is with either an apartment or living in undesirable areas. Detached homes in the cities people want to live in are straight up out of reach for many younger people. Or as John Oliver put it in an episode about HOAs:

“Our main story tonight concerns home ownership, so if you are under 35, honestly, this story isn’t for you,” Oliver said. “It’ll never be for you. You will never own a home. Sorry, that is the deal that you made when you decided to be born after 1988.”

IMO, it would show the power and value of the EU. The UK would be far more willing to admit that they shouldn't have left if they can get back in. The EU stands to gain from such a prominent country (and one that can say so from experience) undeniably admitting that it's better to be in the EU than to leave. That's some stellar advertising of the economic value of the EU.

Though they definitely shouldn't bend every rule to let them back in. The pound should be replaced by the euro. It's dumb that the UK got that exception.

Sure, but in this analogy, your ex wife was great partner that was good for you and you only broke up because you thought you could do better. Only after your divorce, you realize you aren't actually doing better on your own and want your ex wife back, but are too afraid to admit it. And also your ex wife might not want you back anymore (if she does, she's gonna ask you to really prove you're committed).