Lovable Sidekick @ LovableSidekick @lemmy.world

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Joined

9 mo. ago

Unfortunately Firefox is a product whose job is to show ads for profit, so the only way to "donate" to it is to click ads.

LPT: when you're this incoherent it's time to reassess your meds.

Side note: ICE now has a bigger budget than the FBI, DEA and Bureau of Prisons put together.

My grandmother was an adult through that 66-year period. Lived to be 99. She rode to town on a horse as a kid and took trips on jets before she died.

My in-laws do that. Just today I ordered them a lighted electric kettle.

I like big-ass garlic stuffed green olives.

Ingenious name. I feel like Bitchat should be connected somehow with PenIsland.

Back in the 1990s I did a thought experiment using 1990s industrial cost figures and production volumes I found online. Turned out Americans could save the Amazon rainforest by cutting our beef consumption by 10%. I don't have the math on hand but the gist was that if demand for beef in America dropped 10%, so would demand for cattle feed, which was mostly corn. Reducing corn production by that much and devoting the land to hemp cultivation (which would work) would produce enough hemp fiber to replace all the wood pulp being imported from Brazil to make paper. At that time most trees being logged in the Amazon region were being pulped and exported to the US. So boom, demand for Amazon pulp logs drops to zero, rainforest saved!

Admittedly this was simplistic and did not account for pulp producers selling to other countries that may have been competing with the US to buy the pulp. But they would have to compete with whatever other pulp sources those customers already had. Anyway, just the fact that the numbers worked out so well helped me understand how a trend in one area can affect seemingly unrelated areas. Like, I dunno, people buy fewer Barbies and the price of air conditioners goes down. I'm sure some people make a lot of money by figuring out stuff like that.

Steady now, my generation got through the Macarena, you'll get through this. Nice deep breaths... in... out...

Clever. For me simply not being interested in buying stuff is sufficient.

Not really accurate - publishers might put papers behind paywalls, but researchers themselves are usually glad to send them to anyone who requests them as long as they have time. And it's totally legal, not like they're pirating their own papers.

Insightful. I think what happened with tuition was that universities were actually undercharging until around 1980, when they realized they could charge a lot more and people would still pay it, so they did. In America there's a prevailing mindset that the economy boomers grew up in was normal, and today's economy is stunted. The economy of the 1950s and 60s was actually an anomalous boom, like a bumper crop. Today's economy is what it would have been decades ago if the business world had risked charging higher prices and paying lower wages back then, instead of waiting for an excuse like COVID. Kind of a harsh realization.

Shifting personnel to grocery duty during work time to handle a surge or whatever is fine. Asking them to volunteer their free time is bullshit. I might do it if Bezos volunteered to come clean my house.

For clarity, Mozilla isn't one thing. There's Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.

ChatGPT didn't "think" anything. It generated instructions telling users to do things incorrectly based on the human-generated content in its training data, which it didn't understand because it doesn't understand anything.

Yes, knowing how much worse whatever you're going through will be if you're homeless is SO much better than therapy! What a breakthrough!!! No eggs benedict for me, thank you, these bootstraps taste just fine!!!

Only if you believe the prophecies that fell through the time hole.

I'm just amazed it apparently took two people to think of taping 4 air filters together with a fan on top.

Indeed, which is why getting shot in the heel was every warrior's Achilles Heel.

Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.