cecilkorik @ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

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515

Joined

2 yr. ago

Federation alone would give a lot of utility. The whole point is not to be a walled garden of discrete silos. If I can post on Lemmy from Mastodon, why shouldn't I be able to post a comment on a model?

If a government raises taxes for something so that working class people cannot buy it, that government becomes richer by exploiting the working class.

Governments don't become "rich", and if they do, that either signals unchecked corruption, or a government that is investing wisely in the nation's present and future, depending on where the money is going. This may seem contradictory, but the reality is, you need a much deeper and broader understanding of your government's finances and economic plan before the accusations you're making will hold any weight. This is not something that can be reasoned about in the abstract and addressed with news-bite talking points. It a hugely complex situation and people spend lifetimes studying this.

A government that is genuinely exploiting the working class should be replaced by the working class with a government that supports and protects the working class. If you do not have the power to choose your government, then you need to figure that out how to organize the working class and acquire that power first, otherwise you're wasting your time trying to change a government you have no control over, and that's not going to work and it's never going to support and protect you.

CO2 makes up a miniscule amount of our atmosphere.

This is accurate.

In the past there have been ice ages while the atmospheric CO2 level was 10 times higher than it is now.

This is misleading disinformation

The notion that eating insects will save the world seems a little dubious.

This is accurate.

Parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.

should actually be

Parenthesis, exponents, (multiplication and division), (addition and subtraction).

Addition and subtraction are given the same priority, and are done in the same step, from left to right.

It's not a great system of notation, it could be made far clearer (and parenthesis allow you to make it as clear as you like), but it's essentially the universal standard now and it's what we're stuck with.

I doubt there is video of that... why would they be filming his back?

What bubble have they got you trapped in? Literally every video I can find shows both Nazi salutes Elon Musk did. Here's a link to PBS's video.

I'm not sure what your point is. We agree on the facts, and my speculation is as good as yours. There are some options a stateless person stuck in an airport without passport can pursue, but they take time, sometimes a whole lot of time, maybe even a lifetime (there's even a movie about it, and a famous person it happened to) and in that time, does anyone actually think he was just treated normally and in good faith by Russian authorities, and he decided:

a) "hey these Russian folks are alright and want to help me out and certainly don't spy on their own citizens like the US does which is famously what I was whistleblowing about in the first place maybe would like to live here forever because I don't care about having human rights anymore"

and/or

b) "aha the US fell perfectly for my sinister plan to create plausible deniabilty to pretend that I wasn't secretly a russian agent all along by making it look like I became trapped in Russia entirely by accident, when it was exactly where I wanted to be! those suckers!"

I don't think either of those things are plausible. I think he got stuck in Russia, and the Kremlin realized how fortunate this was for them, and they took advantage of his stateless status to make sure he never left while making sure he said all the right things to make sure everyone knew it was entirely "his choice made of his own free will", as such dictatorships like to do. I'm sure it has been explained to him that it would be dangerous for him to leave Russia's "protection". It's speculation, granted, but I believe it in absence of any other more convincing theory.

Will they be powered by... let me guess... gas turbines? Like all the other hyperscale datacenters that are being developed now? Or is bell constructing some new wind farms and hydro reservoirs we don't know about? Or are we just "letting the market decide?"

It's really sad the way he got captured in Russia during his escape. I think he rightly believed that was somewhere the US couldn't likely get to him, and he was right, but his understandable fear of US persecution blinded him to the fact that the danger from enemies of the US was just as great.

Putin captured him to use as a pawn against the US and to try to extract any remaining information he could from him and I'm sure at this point he's mostly accomplished that goal. I feel like at this point he is basically a political prisoner and he has to play along and cooperate with the regime to survive, I don't think Putin would ever let him leave even if he was pardoned, he's too useful to keep under his thumb. I hope to be proven wrong and that he escapes someday, whether released legitimately as being past his usefulness, or by fleeing and finding somewhere else to hide, but I'm not optimistic with the state of the world these days.

The cost of whistleblowing can be very high and very permanent, as they are in this case, and no amount of protection will ever make you totally safe from consequences, and that's the way the powers that be like it despite what they may say.

Everything is flushable if you're brave enough and your toilet is big enough. I flush whole garbage bags and small appliances down my powerflush-9,000,000. The local water authority hates me, they have to keep a crew on standby at the end of my driveway to haul my garbage away after unclogging the sewers, but I write "flushable" on each one to taunt them so they know there's nothing they can do to stop me.

In all seriousness, we need to stop this anti-social behavior. It's a problem, the government needs to step in to protect consumers and municipalities and hold manufacturers accountable.

If you had FTL travel, you wouldn't use radio, but you could set up an FTL pony express. Or even something like a "conveyor belt" of microsats FTLing to a destination, dropping off their messages, and FTLing back with the replies. Whether that's practical or not and how fast it is depends on how exactly your FTL works, but it's hard to build a situation where you can FTL travel without having almost equivalently fast communication times.

Without FTL though, you're right, the communication situation gets real dicey real fast. Whether you're using generation ships or cryosleep or life extension to span the lightyears is irrelevant, by the time a colony ship reaches another system, both it and the humanity back on Earth will have diverged significantly due to lack of communication, and will continue to diverge as different events and pressures and developments affect each group differently. Imagine we started getting pen pals from the 1800s, but then to leave them a message, we have to wait for them to get to the 2020s to read it, and then by the time we get a reply maybe we'll be in the 2300s. What can we even try to meaningfully talk about? It's more like opening time capsules and studying history than anything resembling communication. It's interesting, but neither of our lives are at all relevant to each other. We are separated by too much time and without breaking light speed we can't break that.

Psychologically it is very difficult to imagine any two hypothetical civilizations not eventually separating and developing independently, because in all practical senses they will be completely independent of each other. And that's a manifestation of physical reality, there is really nothing we can do to avoid it. Not even an attempt at tyrannical oppression to make it otherwise can survive hundreds of years of delayed communication. Any "oppressors" sent will quickly end up having more in common with and more dependence on the colonists they are oppressing than they will with their "command" back in Earth-space. Even if they are successful, it's almost impossible to imagine they will not just end up as rulers of a separate independent colony. And then when Earth finds out hundreds of years later that their guys aren't quite following the orders they would've sent if they had been able to, what could they even do about it? Spend more hundreds of years sending more oppressors? Which will just end up doing the same thing? And why would they bother? If they want to loot their resources, is it still even going to be useful by the time they can get it back?

It's wild to think that after a few thousand years of independent development, we may not even recognize each other anymore, and we definitely won't think of each other as the "same" people. This will probably even be the case within the solar system, in some respects it already happens even here on Earth, nevermind once you start trying to stretch humanity across light years. Whoever those creatures that colonize other stars might be, it won't be long before we probably won't consider them "us", and they probably won't consider themselves "us" either.

Almost any type of plastic that can be manufactured (and even some that otherwise sort of cannot) can also be 3d printed and almost all are available as filaments. Some of these filaments are very difficult to print, or very expensive, or very hard to find, or all of the above, but if you need 3d printer filament that meets any particular certification or material needs, there's probably a filament for that, and it likely has official certification too. 3d printing is being used everywhere now, commercially and industrially. It's not just for home-gamers anymore.

And even if you don't find something you can print that will quite meet the same technical level of certification, there are still plenty of easy to print filaments that have quite good properties for things like flammability. It's good to keep things like that in mind though, especially if you're the sort of person who just defaults to PLA or PETG for everything. (I'm guilty of this)

Just because you've given up doesn't mean anyone else should. You don't have to be able to solve the problem to at least stop making the problem worse. Tiny incremental progress is better than perfection, because the latter doesn't exist, and if it did, it would be made out of lots of tiny incremental progress.

Because everything that has made life worse for millennials, is not fixed, not even a little bit, and is not going to be fixed. It is going to keep getting worse and it is not clear people are even really trying to fix anything anymore because we are, as the article points out, burned out. There is almost nothing on the horizon that has much potential for making anything any better or easier for anybody, and the few things that do have that potential, like AI and automation, are very clearly (to me) going to be misused for exploiting humans in almost every possible way and making life harder not easier for the vast majority of the human population which likely includes everybody commenting here.

GenZ may instead get burned-out literally -- from their homes, as humanity continues to work mindlessly towards a goal of creating enough heat to set the entire planet on fire, but maybe the rising oceans will put some of the fires out. Families and mental health and the fabric of society will continue to fray. Prices will keep rising. The wealth gap will continue expanding. Lawlessness and homelessness will become rampant. Democracy will continue to slide towards corporate tyranny and fascism, and peace begins to make way for conflict and war.

Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it's going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it's not financial gain they're after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it's to hide something else they're doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.

Don't worry, GenZ will eventually get even more burnt out than us. They're just not there yet. We all have it rough.

Honestly the hardest part of doing this seems to be settling on what we're going to call it. Ironically, it is difficult to search for and discover sites following this philosophy precisely because they are so decentralized and independent and nobody's even using any common terminology for it. I've heard variations of this called Web 1.0, Small Web, Indie Web, Nostalgia Web, Old Web, Retro Web, Analog Web, Free Web, Libre Web, and dozens more terms even more vague and difficult to remember off the top of my head. "Small Web" seems to have the most traction from what I can tell but discovery remains such a hard problem to solve, especially without falling into the same traps that led us here.

I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”

I mean, if I didn't know better, I'd start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don't really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they'll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That's their racket.

The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom's) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.

Unless you're willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you're going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It's literally a "this is why we can't have nice things" situation.

Welcome to the enshittification phase of the economy. Everything will be enshittified, even the economy itself.

"Blatant land and money grab with impossible grind. Offers pay 2 win, but even pay 2 win doesn't get you through the grind. I'm selling all the oil I can for in-game currency and it's not even making a dent. Huge rip off"

I trust the community, but not blindly. I trust those who have a proven track record, and I proxy that trust through them whenever possible. I trust the standards and quality of the Debian organization and by extension I trust the packages they maintain and curate. If I have to install something from source that is outside a major distribution then my trust might be reduced. I might do some cursory research on the history of the project and the people behind it, I might look closer at the code. Or I might not. A lot of software doesn't require much trust. A web app running in its own limited user on a well-secured and up-to-date VPS or VM, in the unlikely event it turned out to be a malicious backdoor, it is simply an annoyance and it will be purged. In its own limited user, there's not that much it can do and it can't really hide. If I'm off the beaten track in something that requires a bit more trust, something security related, or something that I'm going to run it as root, or it's going to be running as a core part of my network, I'll go further. Maybe I "audit" in the sense that I check the bug tracker and for CVEs to understand how seriously they take potential security issues.

Yeah if that malicious software I ran that I didn't think required a lot of trust, happens to have snuck in a way to use a bunch of 0-day exploits and gets root access and gets into the rest of my network and starts injecting itself into my hardware persistently then I'm going to have a really bad day probably followed by a really bad year. That's a given. It's a risk that is always present, I'm a single guy homelabbing a bunch of fun stuff, I'm no match for a sophisticated and likely targeted nation-state level attack, and I'm never going to be. If On the other hand if I get hacked and ransomwared along with 10,000 other people from some compromised project that I trusted a little too much at least I'll consider myself in good company, give the hackers credit where credit is due, and I'll try to learn from the experience. But I will say they'd better be really sneaky, do their attack quickly and it had better be very sophisticated, because I'm not stupid either and I do pay pretty close attention to changes to my network and to any new software I'm running in particular.