Ha, interesting question, really cool answers all around.

For me, it was many years ago when I went with a friend to visit a common friend that was studying in Vermont (we 3 are from Europe), and using the occasion we went to visit new York as well. One night we went to have a walk around Times Square and took the subway to get there. I was just standing there checking out the map to keep myself busy when this huge black guy wearing an even bigger fur coat that was sitting started talking to me and asking where I was going and if I needed help.

At first I awkwardly said that I didn’t need any help, I was just looking at the map to keep busy. He insisted asking where I was going, to which I answered to have a stroll around times square. He got quite cheerful and said he was going in the same direction and he knew a shortcut. At that point I got a bit suspicious but the guy said changing the train we would get there faster, I confirmed that indeed the other train was going in that direction and he told us to follow him. Despite my suspicion as long as there was plenty of people around I decided to trust him and go with him.

After the change of train he told me he knew another trick about that station, everyone was going to the normal stairs but he told us if we go a bit further we can avoid those stairs. He took us to an escalator that took us into an exit straight at Times square.

In the meantime we started talking with him, he told us he was going that night to have a guy’s night out with his friends and they were going to Atlantic City. He started telling us about his life, he was a music editor, and was married, and loved to help people visiting new York. By the time we got out into the street it felt like we were quite close friends and we stayed there a bit still talking, he was one of the nicest random people I have ever met, we took a photo together and he gave me his contact card in case I ever returned to NY (which I didn’t).

I’ve thought about him ever since and wondered how he was doing. It’s a great memory I have of such a simple random encounter.

Most likely I’m too specific about it, but I see quite some shows mentioned that I’d not really consider underrated or unrecognised. Firefly is one of my all time favourites but not really underrated or unrecognised. Or Fringe, possibly not even From (of which I’ll just say I very much hope they have an ending planned because I don’t want it to end lost like Lost).

Perfect examples of underrated or unrecognised shows are Galavant and Utopia, mentioned by others, they are brilliant.

In a similar direction I’d say Dead Set, a UK show that really surprised me ages ago but never see mentioned. https://imdb.com/title/tt1285482/

Maybe I should include also Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, but that may be a lot less underrated and it’s a minishow only.

It’s either Matrix or Fight Club, I guess it depends on the day

It was already tough being in a world where it’s hard to see the difference between the onion articles and actual news. Now we’re on a completely new level where news can be the result of playing CAH. It’s kinda funny until you stop to think how terrible it is.

I can’t see anyone mentioning Titan A.E. man I love that movie, the mix of hand drawn animation and CGI was great for the time and I really enjoyed the world building.

The thing is that “excellent” is something they are not… Look I enjoyed the movies too, they can be quite fun. Some aspects are great, the action and stunt work is in my opinion flawless for the time. Some other things were great too and some others not so much. But in general, really they are not good movies if we try to be a bit neutral, and at the very least they can’t follow the complexity of the theme from the first movie while making it look so simple like that one did. It may just be the case of standing too close to the sun, the movies as part of the trilogy just can’t compare. So people have a feeling of rejection to them. And probably the one thing people find it tough to come to grips with is the fact that the first movie had great action, that helped the movie go forward, while the others just seem to have random action scenes that are just not part of the story. It’s just about how they are added into the story.

But don’t let that bother you, enjoy the movies, I still do, they are just not the masterpieces the first one was.

And no, its not about wanting the first one again, in essence, I wish the movies would have managed to expand the story in a refreshing way like the Animatrix did. But they just fall flat instead, simple mindless fun that kinda finish the storyline quite OK for me.

Now the fourth part… That was brilliant, a brilliant crap, but brilliant nonetheless. If my guess is not wrong, it was a great middle finger to the movie execs that wanted to squeeze more money out of the movies.

What do you mean? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_II_(film)

I can understand that some people don’t want to deal with changing keyboards even if they don’t want to be tracked. But you are literally here asking about keyboards. If this is not the place to talk about this then what is? Anyone interested enough to wonder about what keyboard they use should consider their privacy as the main aspect for a keyboard, as it is an app that can see everything you write, including passwords.

but the reality is most foss apps are far inferior user experiences to corporate apps

This is absolutely wrong and too often repeated as a mantra, and not because they have actually good UX, but because the corporate apps have it worse even (but they set the standard so anything that isn’t like theirs is bad). From all keyboards I have tried (many, including corporate ones, closed source, etc) the closed source ones have usually the worse UX. They start better and then worsen over time. You said you like the personalisation options, but often there’s less options in any closed source corporate keyboard. It took them years for gboard to actually let users have the number row always on top. I could have that in other keyboards long before gboard. Swiftkey was wonderful, but over the years it got so bloated that it lagged when used. There’s unfortunately not a perfect keyboard, but through all the posts in this thread there were a lot of good recommendations that allow you to choose good customisability, respect of user privacy, and also fringe use cases not often supported. And in general, the worse options are the closed source ones.

The only real downside of Foss keyboards is that as they have more options they usually require a bit more set up time which puts many people off.

I’m currently using Heliboard, lots of customisability, Foss, good language support and a must for me, multi language support. So far I am making less typos than with many other keyboards. The downside is no swipe support right in the app, but you can get it to work too if interested using 3rd party libraries.

In the past I’ve been using gboard which was OK for a while but started making more and more typos and wrong corrections over time, that plus trying to degoogle myself pushed me away.

Also anysoft keyboard, pretty nice, and was quite happy with it but again started getting tired of some typos I kept making.

I am keeping an eye on futo keyboard too, which at the moment doesn’t support multi language support, maybe in the future when implemented I’ll try it.

Does it need to be real just to be roasted?

Well damn, thank you so much for the answer. That has gone well and beyond what I’d have called a great answer.

First of all I just wanted to acknowledge the time you put into it, I just read it and in order to make a meaningful answer for discussion I probably need to read your comment a couple more times, and consider my own perspective on those topics, and also study a few drops of information you gave where sincerely you lost me :D (being a neutral monist, and about Searle and such, I need to study a bit that area). So, I want to give an adequate response to you as well and I’ll need some time for that, but before anything, thanks for the conversation, I didn’t want to wait to say that later on.

Also, worth mentioning that you did hit the nail in the head when you summed up all my rambling into a coherent one question/topic. I keep debating myself about how I can support creators while also appreciating the usefulness of a tool such as LLMs that can help me create things myself that I couldn’t before. There has to be a balance somewhere there… (Fellow programmer brain here trying to solve things like if you are debugging software, no doubt the wrong perspective for such a complex context).

UBI is definitely a goal to be achieved that could help in many ways, just like a huge reform of copyright would also be necessary to remove all the predators that are already abusing creators by taking their legal rights on the content created.

The point you make of anthropomorphizing LLMs is absolutely a key point, in fact I avoid all I can mentioning AI because I believe it muddles the waters so much more than it should (but it’s a great way of selling the software). For me it goes the other way actually and I wonder how different we are from an LLM (oversimplifying much…) in the methods we apply to create something and where’s the line of being creative vs depending on previous things experienced and basing our creation in previous things.

Anyway, that starts getting a bit too philosophical, which can be fun but less practical. Respecting your other comment, I do indeed follow Doctorow, it’s fascinating how much he writes, and how clear he can expose ideas. It’s tough to catch up with him at times with so much content. I also got his books in the last humble bundle, so happy to buy books without DRM… I’ll try to think a bit more these days on these topics and see what I can come up with. I don’t want to continue rambling like a madman without setting some order to my own thoughts first. Anyway, thanks for the interesting conversation.

I would love to hear your opinion on something I keep thinking about. There’s the whole idea that these LLMs are training on “available” data all over the internet, and then anyone can use the LLM and create something that could resemble the work of someone else. Then there’s the people calling it theft (in my opinion wrong from any possible angle of consideration) and those calling it fair use (I kinda lean more on this side). But then we have the side of compensation for authors and such, which would be great if some form for it would be found. Any one person can learn about the style of an author and imitate it without really copying the same piece of art. That person cannot be sued for stealing “style”, and it feels like the LLM is basically in the same area of creating content. And authors have never been compensated for someone imitating them.

So… What would make the case of LLMs different? What are good points against it that don’t end up falling into the “stealing content” discussion? How to guarantee authors are compensated for their works? How can we guarantee that a company doesn’t order a book (or a reading with your voice in the case of voice actors, or pictures and drawings, …) and then reproduces the same content without you not having to pay you? How can we differentiate between a synthetic voice trained with thousand of voices but not the voice of person A but creates a voice similar to that of A against the case of a company “stealing” the voice of A directly? I feel there’s a lot of nuances here and don’t know what or how to cover all of it easily and most discussion I read are just “steal vs fair use” only.

Can this only end properly with a full reform of copyright? It’s not like authors are nowadays very well protected either. Publishers basically take their creation to be used and abused without the author having any say in it (like in the case of spot if unpublished a artists relationship and payment agreements).

I just wanted to say, it’s refreshing to read a well argumented comment such as this one. It’s good to see every once in a while there are still some people thinking things through without falling for automatic hatred to either side of a discussion.

Why would you make the immigrants suffer his presence? They have it hard enough as it is. I prefer to think he’ll get to make some nice friends in prison.

I’m so glad to see this posted. The whole meme of bear vs man made me feel at odds and while I saw what the point was that it tried to raise it still didn’t really do a great job to me. After a lot of thinking about it and discussing it in other threads I finally understood what I feel is the issue. While the answer given by most (if not all) women is shocking and shows the feeling of uncertainty and unsafeness the question is framed in such a way that it creates division and sexism. The problem is not what women are answering, the issue is that it puts men on the other side without any more thought. It divides us into women vs either men or bears. I’m not a woman, I’m not a bear, and I don’t want to be a man seen as a danger. I understand the issue and I want to be part of the solution and create a safer world for everyone.

This whole topic wouldn’t have made me see the problem if it wasn’t for the effect that other ways to raise awareness have had in the past. For me the greatest method to raise awareness was the #metoo movement. That’s when I could see the issue and what kind of effect it has. It was a movement that didn’t automatically make me feel excluded, it was a movement that raised awareness of the victims, but it didn’t have to be only women, also men that had been victims could raise it if they felt empowered by it. It was horrifying seeing the spread of it, and then there must be all the ones that didn’t say anything. That’s a movement I can get behind, that’s the way to raise awareness. Since then I try to be more aware of the kind of behavior that creates those feelings of unsafeness for women and if I would ever notice something done by others I’d try to step up. The whole man vs bear is terrible at doing the same.

After a lot of thinking and reading a lot of the answers here (only considering the actually serious ones, not the ones dismissing what it means that women answer the bears or the ones that dismiss the answers of men unhappy about the comparison) I’ve come up with what bothers me of the whole situation and since you seemed to actually be really polite in the discussion and spent the effort on giving me a different point of view I wanted to post my realization and thought process with an answer for you but also hoping others will see it.

The issue we are facing with this hypothetical situation and question, “would you rather meet a random unknown man or a bear alone in the forest?”, is that instead of raising awareness of the issue, instead of trying to find a solution, it is increasing the problem, it increases and promotes the fear. Let me explain better.

The issue I feel is clearer if we change the question not to aim sexism and sexual assault, but aim it at describing racism and violence due to racism. If you are a black person (we could simplify by assuming a man, to avoid getting again into the gender differences), would you want to meet a random white guy or a bear alone in the forest? Now, black people can and definitely are suffering racism at different levels constantly, depending where they live we can say that most have been the objective of some racist behavior. If they answer “I’d rather face a bear than a random white guy” because they are afraid they are going to end up meeting a white dude that is racist and would attack them due to race, it demonstrates a big issue that there’s that fear but there’s no way around the fact that the question is racist and pushes the racism forward by increasing the fear of any random white guy when in average no white person would wish any bad to any other race (which doesn’t mean racism isn’t a big issue in society).

The hypothetical question is a sexist question the way it is made that enforces the fear of any man. We need to make this very clear. Men are not rapists by default. Men won’t assault a woman when they get a chance. When a man is not attacking a woman it is not for a lack of opportunity. That’s what this hypothetical does, it tells that the only thing needed for a random man to assault a woman is an opportunity. Way too many women suffer sexual assault, it is a problem too widespread, but not because all men do it, but because most women suffer it. The answer to the hypothetical question should be “a man, because a random man out of the whole population is nearly without a doubt not going to be a rapist”. The fact that the answer is not that, means that we as a society are failing at making half the population feel safe. See, the problem is not the answer of women, the problem is the question, the question causes more damage than anything by enforcing the fear and dividing society between men and women. Instead of dividing society between rapists, assaulters and victims. Most women are victims of sexual assault, but not only women are victims. By setting the question as man vs bear, it enforces a different type of sexism. Men that feel that sexism and raise the issue are being marked as part of the problem, as assaulters. If I feel that the question is sexist and problematic it must mean that I don’t care for women and their safety, I’m a bear too… That’s what this question is proving to me, the amount of sexism still present both ways and how unsafe women feel around unknown men.

I think that this hypothetical is dangerous, it creates division based on gender, it makes sexism a bigger issue instead of fighting it. Instead, better ways of handling this topic could be such as raising awareness of how many victims of sexual assault there are the way it was done with the #metoo tag (if I remember correctly that’s what it was called) in social networks where many victims felt empowered to come out and show how many there are. Independent of gender. Another good way to raise awareness is another thread I saw yesterday asking women what they would do if they had 24 hours where there would be no men around without consequences for them, after 24 hours they are back and all continues as usual. Most were answering that they would dress nice, even provocative, put make up, go out with girlfriends and drink, without the fear of being abused, assaulted or worse. That shows the real problem. That tells a lot about the lack of safety for women specifically without making the men that are also victims feel like part of the problem. We can tell how women feel normally, without muddling the waters by comparing men to bears, and equating victims to women and men as the problem, when men can also be victims. We need to address these issues, yes. But not like this. Not making sexism a bigger issue.

The issue here is the way the message is delivered. We as a society need to bring attention to the issue of safety for women and sexual assault overall and try to find solutions for it. I think there are examples of great ways to do that (bring attention to it I mean, no clue how to fix it), one that comes to mind is the whole movement that I think was called #metoo or something along those lines? I think it brought a lot of attention to this and it allowed me personally to understand better the depth of the issue of safety for women. It made me more aware, it made me reconsider many things and made me want to be helpful.

Today there was another post around where it was asked of women “if all men disappear for 24 hours without consequences, what would you do in that time”. So many many answers were just “go party with my girlfriends and dress however I want and get hammered without feeling threatened” or something similar, and that post alone made the issue of safety for women so much clearer and stand out so perfectly than this meme, and more importantly the original question…

The problem is that this kind of discussion creates a barrier, it divides, it moves the discussion from the real issue, women’s safety, to a wrong topic, are men as dangerous as a bear. In itself it’s a question that promotes another type of sexism, it promotes fear, with the excuse of making a point and raising awareness. Instead of raising awareness it’s muddling the waters in reality which is not the way anyone will be feeling safer in any way.

Damn, a post that makes sense… I guess I found the needle in the hay… Really well put.

I’ve been trying to set my head in between these two opinions, the one being “as a man I’m saddened and unhappy to be included in the category where women feel safer with a bear than with me unjustly” and the other being “women have it so bad that this is the reality for them”.

In such a case I feel like we have a couple of issues to resolve. The first one being the fact that sexual assault of different levels (not everything is rape or not, there’s other ways to suffer it) is definitely a real issue that most women if not all suffer one way or another. The other issue is the fear of all men in consequence of it. This kind of bear/man discussion does two things in my opinion, bring the topic up to a point where it is talked about more openly (which is good) and also perpetuate the fear by generating this constant feel that unknown men equal danger (obviously bad, not only for men, but also removing any possibility of trust from women, one that might be lucky to not have had any sexual assault experience will be afraid of it by default).

This is a problem that we need to resolve together, both men and women of all kinds, the men saying “but I’m not worse than a bear, I would help you get out of the forest without expecting anything in return or attacking you”, would need to bring any sexual assault to attention if they notice it, discourage and negate other men (friends or whatever) from wrong behaviors and help women that would need it. Also women should encourage the kind of men that would do that kind of thing, should help bring the gap of trust closer by thanking the men they know and feel safe with. Making a discourse of them against us would only create a bigger division and more sexism and I feel this kind of discourse gets lost when generalizations like this one happen with the bear and the man, despite the fact that it brings up such important issues as the unsafeness women feel with unknown men.

This is not meant to put down the importance of how women feel unsafe, it is by far more important to tackle the sexual assault topics than it is to tackle the fact that I’m considered worse than a bear by women that don’t know me. And thinking of that is how I ended up siding more with the person that did the comparison, now, how could we do it in a better way, one that won’t automatically move the conversation to “but not all men are bad”?

Edit: I want to point out that I don’t mean now women should thank men for making them feel safe, that’s like the minimum any person should do with others around, but when it comes to this kind of discussion, acknowledging that there are men trying to do good and not all would jump at the chance of raping someone is a good thing to bring up to avoid losing the importance of the topic by going sideways and off topic.

Yeah he worked in Microsoft before that and when he ended in Nokia the path was quite clear what it would be. But I’ve had the chance to talk with many engineers that were working at Nokia back in the day and the problems didn’t start because of Microsoft.

Basically Nokia had the whole management divided between symbian, maemo, and windows mobile, and as they couldn’t agree on a future path all the efforts were divided. Symbian was quite a disaster at the end and it wouldn’t have gone far most likely, those that wanted to continue with it didn’t have a clear view of the changes coming in the mobile world.

Maemo was great, really advanced, based on Linux, and working really well, maybe too advanced even, specially for your common users back then. The whole system was constantly put down and delayed and the first devices sold wouldn’t even work as a phone, only the 4th ended up with mobile connection, which didn’t help at all to make it useful (wifi was not as big as it is now) and sold.

Finally there was Windows Mobile which was still starting basically then and had far less strength, but with the support of Microsoft behind it it was easier to push it out. I don’t understand why it still has such support when it comes to the UI, I personally never liked it and it felt too simplistic and boring, but the more options the better I guess. Of course once Microsoft managed to plant his own guy inside Nokia they managed to favor the balance towards Win mobile and the other two were left behind more and more.

So Microsoft was a key part in what ended happening but they were not the ones that put Nokia in trouble. That was a lack of direction in the management level.

Maemo was so much better than any os coming after it… Meego was in my opinion the wrong path to take. I still miss the N900, what an amazing device it was…