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solrize

@ solrize @lemmy.ml

Posts
19
Comments
853
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • An obligate carnivore is an animal that cannot get all the nutrients it needs from plant matter and bacteria,

    No that's wrong, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore#Obligate_carnivores , "Obligate or "true" carnivores are those whose diet in the wild requires nutrients found only in animal flesh." The key words are "in the wild". As I mentioned in my post that I linked, it's quite difficult (though possible) for humans to live purely on wild plants. Vegan humans usually consume a lot of beans and grains that have to be cooked before eating, i.e. transformed to a state not found in the wild. But then they do fine. Is the same possible with cats, particularly if can you add synthetic amino acids? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it's a biology question that isn't disposed of by the words "obligate carnivore".

    Preferences aren't that relevant. Humans by nature usually prefer beer and doughnuts over anything healthy. They have to consciously override that impulse or end up like Homer Simpson.

    Also regarding evolution, cats aren't just carnivores, they're predators. Their natural diet is meat that was killed just moments ago. If feed them instead on canned meat that was killed months ago, you're turning them into scavengers, not so natural. Cows and chickens, of course, didn't evolve to live in factory farms either.

    Again though whether vegan diets are good or bad for cats is completely irrelevant to the stupidity of that thread. Even if you think it came to the right answer about cat diets, a stopped clock is right twice a day. The issue is rejecting any type of careful thought or research in reaching the conclusion, not the conclusion itself.

    No I don't have a cat. We had cats when I was a kid and we fed them cat food with meat in it (the concept of vegan cat food would have been totally alien to us at that time). We didn't underfeed them. The cats killed mice and bugs anyway. They do that, it's called "overkill", a biology term that describes a predator animal killing more prey than it needs to eat. As I mentioned too, the cats even tried to feed US sometimes. They occasionally brought home dead mice or birds that they dropped in front of us. I don't think we ever ate any though.

  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • It's hard to tell a cat what to eat or what not to eat. I posted about that in the thread. We had cats at home when I was a kid, we fed them regular (non vegan) cat food, but they also constantly killed mice and bugs and stuff like that. Apparently domestic cats decimate bird populations, and they kill way more than they actually eat.

    All of that is irrelevant though. That thread is full of people who saw the words "obligate carnivore" and immediately inferred that a cat that doesn't eat meat will die. That's logically and scientifically ridiculous and ignores the actual definition of an obligate carnivore. So the stupidity was unbearable. It's fine to get into a careful dicussion about cat nutrition involving veterinarian advice and scientific studies and reach a pro or anti vegan conclusion. But saying "obligate carnivore" as a thought-stopper and having it work on the site admin just showed that the site was too messed up to engage with. Simliar debates happen on Wikipedia all the time but each side brings miles of citations to the table. I.e., they would have at least weighed actual facts instead of stopping after a slogan decided everything.

    Fwiw someone in the thread said that cats require taurine (an amino acid) in their diets and that taurine isn't found in plant sources, but that it can be synthesized. Does a plant diet with synthetic taurine supplements give a healthy cat all by itself? IDK, but it means that the topic is more complicated than "obligate carnivore, hur hur!!".

  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • Well, raising livestock for meat to feed to your cat doesn't sound so natural for the meat animal either ;). But, I was less bothered by the vegan-ethics stuff in that thread than the just plain stupidity. And no it's generally not worthwhile calling out stupidity in that type of thread, when the stupidity is coming from a hive mind. All you can do to keep your sanity is nope out.

  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • I just re-read some of that thread and omg, the the stupidity level was overpowering. There were some earlier incidents but that one clinched it for me.

  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • Ok I just looked there and got some chuckles. I wouldn't lose sleep over it. Anyway like they say on AO3: don't like, don't read.

  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • Well you can find the actual wording, but I think it didn't have much effect except that one discussion. The edict was issued and otherwise forgotten about.

  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • Lemmy.world's admin (not community mods but the actual instance admin) decreed that lemmy.world was going to be like Wikipedia, where anything controversial that you posted had to be accompanied by a research citation, more or less. The specific statement under dispute was that brand XYZ vegan cat food was ok to feed to your cat. A bunch of idiots howled "cats are obligate carnivores, hur hur! They can't survive on a vegan diet! Mods, delete that comment!!!!" and the site admin sided with the idiots. So I had to escape from the stupidity. Are you still confused? Btw the vegan cat food is perfectly fine for cats as far as I can tell. No I'm not about to go look for diffs links so some of those details may be garbled by now.

    I don't think the citation policy was ever enforced on anything else, but anything that crazy is hard to forget.

    .world also defederated hexbear because it didn't like hexbear's politics, but I'm a regular on hexbear's covid community (which is pretty good and not that political) so I had to go elsewhere for it. I can still reach it from .ml but this convinced me that the federation model is a failure. There's no giant Spez overlord who can censor you, but there are 100 petty instance admins who can censor you instead. I'm still on Lemmy to stay away from Spez though.

  • DuckDuckGo Is Selling Anti Pervert Glasses That Contain Zero AI, Cameras, or Even Electronics Whatsoever

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  • How do you install software updates?

  • Tennessee Congressional Candidate Arrested for Shooting Flock Safety Cameras

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  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • It's a long story but basically after some stupid drama, lemmy.world banned discussion of cat food unless there was scientific evidence presented that the cat food was healthy for the cat. The drama had been about vegan cat food discussions in the vegan discussion group. Vegan cat food turns out to be a thing and appears to have enough approvals to be sold in pet stores, but people on .world wanting to talk about it should come over here to .ml. No I wasn't a participant in the vegan group discussion itself. I made some posts in the surrounding drama thread that you can probably find in my .world profile from shortly after I joined.

  • Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.

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  • I'm on .ml and just don't see this. I moved here from .world after the cat food ban. The stupidity burned too much for me to stay there. I'm unsubscribed to most of the lemmy communities where the political crap is, so maybe that helps.

  • BMW is putting Spider-Man ads on your dashboard, after promising it never would

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  • End of an era: T-Mobile finally closes the door on 2G for good

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  • I had no idea that 2G worked til just now. Damn. I had to reluctantly mothball my 3G phone some years ago, but maybe there was a way to keep using it on 2G until now.

  • Having trouble downloading a forum thread with wget and httrack

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  • FFF won't work on that site right out of the box, because of the bot challenge. You'll need a workaround. FFF has the same problem with fanfiction.net (FFN) which is one of the biggest fanfic sites. So there are a number of FFF github issues and doc entries related to FFN and looking at those might help. I do know that FFN is scrapable using browser orchestration. https://github.com/FicHub/fichub.net may have some code for that, but getting your own instance running will be quite a bit more headache than just running fanficfare.

  • Having trouble downloading a forum thread with wget and httrack

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  • I tried wget and got a small index file that looks like a bot challenge, maybe Cloudflare Turnstile. I don't know of a simple automated workaround. But, Turnstile gives you a rewritten url that then goes back to the forum page and sets a cookie, iirc. So if you can visit the page with a real browser, then save the cookie and transfer it to wget (there's some option to set an arbitrary header) that's one thing to try.

    There's another hack used by fanfiction.net readers, where if you want to save a multi-page story, you can manually visit each page with a browser, i.e. click "next" again and again to load all the pages. Up to a few dozen such clicks isn't so bad. Fanficfare (fanfic downloading program, sometimes abbreviated FFF, https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare ) then has an option to retrieve the pages from your on-disk browser cache instead of trying to get them from the remote server. That's another approach you can try, either with fanficfare or your own scripts.

    The site you're looking at uses xenforo which is a very popular forum server program. The actual layout of xenforo sites varies, but fanficfare probably already recognizes something similar, so try using one of those interfaces. I think spacebattles.net (another fic site) uses xenforo and FFF supports it, so it might be a good start. You will have to modify FFF to recognize civfanatics instead of spacebattles. It will help to know or pick up some Python, but you shouldn't have to become an expert.

    Added: if you really want to automate your scrape, you will have to orchestrate a browser as mentioned earlier. IDK if there is code around to already do it. If you can program, it's not terribly hard to use Puppeteer or Selenium, but it will take some farting around to deal with the site layout and anti-bot stuff. It's not guaranteed to work right off the bat, but with enough determination you can do it, especially if your scrape volume is low and you can run it slowly. I'm not deeply involved in this stuff (like you, I just occasionally want to download something for personal use) but there are tons of webpages and articles by people (who I'd mostly consider evil) who do it at scale.

  • Having trouble downloading a forum thread with wget and httrack

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  • You're trying to run a scraper, and unfortunately a lot of AI companies are doing the same thing on such a big scale that it creates a DOS attack. So lots of sites now have anti-scraping measures. I clicked the forum link and saw a brief interstitial that looked like bot protection.

    I'm unfamiliar with httrack but wget fails pretty often by the site just rejecting the user agent. Try "wget -Dfoo [url]" to save the response headers in the file "foo", if I remember it right. That will let you check if there is an error code. You could also examine the too-small html index that you got, to see if it has error messages inside.

    Sometimes curl works when wget fails. For both of them, there are CLI options to set the user agent to something different.

    Getting images from forums often requires you to have a login cookie in your client. It's simplest to log into the site and then paste the cookie into your scraping program or script.

    The next thing after wget/curl would be to write a scraping script (say with python urrlib) that can analyze the html a little as it goes. The thing after that would be script an actual browser, with puppeteer or selenium etc.

    Regarding the links pointing to your local disk, that's probably because they are relative links, like "href=./foobar.html". You can make them point to the remote server by inserting an HTML BASE tag into the top of the file, like

    <BASE HREF="https://whateveritwas.com/forum">

    or whatever. If it's just for one or two pages you can do that manually. Otherwise, modify your scraping script to insert it, before or after saving the output.

  • What's a fun piece of free software I should learn to use this week?

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  • Emacs! Emacs Makes All Computing Simple.

  • What are your favorite joke/insult names for corporations?

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  • Some friendlier ones. There was once an expensive camera brand called "Exakta" but Exakta owners affectionately called them "Approxima".

    I worked near a slightly fancy Chinese restaurant called Royal East but my coworkers (who went there often) liked to call it "Royal Eats".

    There was a nearby supermarket called Purity Supreme but people called it Poverty Supreme. That was waaaay before Whole Foods.

    Amherst, Massachusetts was sometimes anagrammed to "Hamster". I mean you could address letters that way and they'd get there.