I thought these bot-communities, which are a blight on Lemmy, exclusively post links to reddit. So how is it technically possible two of those bots end up linked together in one cross-post?
Also please shut them down if you can. They flood the network with zero-engagement posts, creating a terrible experience especially for newcomers on the All feed.
Thanks for putting things into perspective. However, I'm unsure how much sense it makes to compare a country with a city. I guess social dynamics change a bit when population density rises. It's easier to find groups for fringe activities in cities.
What's wrong with desalination research? Water is essential to life, and most water on Earth is salinated. The practical value of this research is apparent, both for ships on sea and coastal regions. So I don't see how these attempts are "worthless", and how it would be bad if they receive more "free money".
The article talks about what could have been a challenge faced by the junkyard scrap model, and how they solved it:
Each stage contained an evaporator and a condenser that used heat from the sun to passively separate salt from incoming water. That design, which the team tested on the roof of an MIT building, efficiently converted the sun’s energy to evaporate water, which was then condensed into drinkable water. But the salt that was left over quickly accumulated as crystals that clogged the system after a few days. In a real-world setting, a user would have to place stages on a frequent basis, which would significantly increase the system’s overall cost.
In a follow-up effort, they devised a solution with a similar layered configuration, this time with an added feature that helped to circulate the incoming water as well as any leftover salt. While this design prevented salt from settling and accumulating on the device, it desalinated water at a relatively low rate.
In the latest iteration, the team believes it has landed on a design that achieves both a high water-production rate, and high salt rejection, meaning that the system can quickly and reliably produce drinking water for an extended period. The key to their new design is a combination of their two previous concepts: a multistage system of evaporators and condensers, that is also configured to boost the circulation of water — and salt — within each stage.
I'm not sure how much money is in desalination, but it's certainly an industry. If a group comes up with a new method, and then nothing happens with it, it's probably because it's either not that great after all, or not that cost effective.
several countries across the Middle East, North Africa & South Asia have extremely high levels of water stress. Many, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Syria, Pakistan, Libya have withdrawal rates well in excess of 100 percent — this means they are either extracting unsustainably from existing aquifer sources, or produce a large share of water from desalinisation.
I guess most see it as a bad thing. As waste, or resignation. But here's the good story!
It can be a fruitful inner dialogue. While writing the comment, you engage with the topic, which changes your mind. That's a healthy and good thing! If in the end, your result is "I'd rather not post that, because ...", then this reason is the insight you gained by writing that comment.
Sometimes I realize flaws in my reasoning this way. And I'm happy to catch them! Imagine if it was not asynchronous written conversation, but real time face to face.
Of course there are many reasons to delete a draft. If it's mostly insecurity, I'd encourage people to give it a try. Experiences are what bring you forward, and if it's only to learn what not to repeat in the future.
If Russia keeps this invasion up for another few years, they’ll run out of soldiers.
Both countries can probably sustain these high losses if they are only willing to keep committed. If we look at WW numbers.
Just a rough calculation: If Ukraine was to send 5% of their population to the front lines, they could lose 200k each year, for more than nine years. Russia obviously more.
@sunaurus@lemm.ee, can we please defederate zerobytes.monster? If you look at https://zerobytes.monster/communities, the numbers are extreme. Thousands of posts per community, but only 2-digit comments (in total! for whole communities!), some have literally 0 comments for thousands of posts.
Most (all?) posts are mere reposts from reddit. Their "bOt" posts so much, the user profile (when viewed from lemm.ee) does not load, so we cannot block it. It drowns the All-feed for new users.
Some concrete examples of instances which we would defederate:
An instance which has a 2:1 ratio of bots to users 🤖
An instance which is focused on creating spam in the network
While it seems to be just one bot and a few users, the activity of that bot vastly outweighs humans, by a factor in the thousands.
I'm not sure if it's their intention to create spam (honestly, no idea what their intention is, really - advertising for reddit?), but in effect, that's what they do.
I appreciated the advice! Found the setting, which was indeed low. Raised it to 200 MB and to require manual confirmation. Today I was asked if I want to compress. The sad part is, the freezes continued in between. So this was not the cause, but thank you still.
We also briefly discussed this in Games Master, if only to discover how wide and diverse the range of perspectives are. I feel it misrepresents the subject to talk about a "literal definition", and to explicitly include "win conditions". Because there are multiple attempts of a definition, and many do not include win conditions.
"To play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity." (Bernard Suits)[14]
You seem to refer to Chris Crawford's definition, which is in part:
If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.
Explicitly calling SimCity "not a game" is purely academic talk, detached from reality. For everyone else, SimCity is clearly a game. If you want to buy it, you look for games, not toys. I feel definitions are questionable which define something to be not what everybody thinks it is.
Was Minecraft not a game until it included "The End"? I loved playing Minecraft, but I rarely cared about The End, even after it was included. When a player cannot tell the difference between a version of a game which includes a win condition, and a version which does not, how can the existence of that condition be a decisive factor?
If we widen the scope to include any game, not just video games, we can also have a look at popular children's games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Association. My theater group loves to play win-free games as a warmup practice.
From my point of view, win conditions are a common characteristic of games, but not necessary or defining. Coming up with a short definition which captures all games and excludes all non-games is surprisingly hard.
Yes, but game theory says no: The Game Theory Of Military Spending (Economics Explained) [13:58]