squaresinger @ squaresinger @lemmy.world

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4 mo. ago

Yeah, the big problem is that each of these steps takes monumental effort while yielding only very little result.

At the current pace, new areas of plastic waste generation are added much faster than old areas are removed.

While we were busy banning plastic straws and plastic bags and stuck the cap onto the bottle, the plastic garbage production industry added thousands new types of unrecyclable products.

Just to clarify though, owning your own car and stereo falls under personal property, not private property. See my comment here for a brief distinction of the two: https://feddit.uk/comment/18187961

Yeah, ok, I see that distinction, it does make sense.

Debatable. They are an island next to Europe. But apart from that, you just stumbled across the joke.

Well, I guess the great depression never happened, correct?

Go, read what I wrote, then come back.

Tbh, I don't even think the first two points apply.

Ownership by the state, especially a state that the people have no control over, isn't really ownership of the people. The main point of ownership (also under communism) is control. If I own something, I control it. I can decide what happens with it. Under capitalism the worker doesn't own the factory, because the worker has no control over it. The worker has no say over what or how or when the factory produces, so the worker doesn't own the factory.

Under the USSR system, the worker also has no say over anything regarding the work. The only difference is that the owner isn't another person but the state.

Something like the early stock corporations would be closer to communism. There each worker owns stock in the company and thus can vote on what the company does.

Same goes with social classes. There certainly was a class difference between party member (or at least high ranking party member) and non-party-members.

Private property also still existed, just on a lower scale. People still owned their cars, their stereo systems and all the other items of daily usage.

(I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to reinforce the point)

fallacy fallacy

I have to admit, a did not know that one. It's even more fitting than the strawman argument! Thanks for sharing, TIL.

(Though I do believe the fallacy fallacy is a subcategory of the strawman argument.)

Huge corporations also underperform compared to smaller startups.

If a small startup wants to roll out some new thing they just get to the work. If a corporation does the same thing it first takes a year of preparation and internal politics.

Remember the old anecdote about how long it takes to order an empty cardboard box at IBM? That one was an extreme example, but the concept persists.

We had a project, created by two people over half a year. The corporate parent liked it and wanted to expand the product to all the country division. So they planned for a year, then assembled 8 teams with a total of 50 people to copy that project with a planned development time of 3 years. They overran the deadline by 2 years.

Governance structures aren't without fail either, as exemplified with quite a few big corporations going down over time.

Governance structures are also present in political systems, and also there they can fail.

A government and a corporation are really not all that dissimilar when it comes to managing work, projects and so on.

That was the joke.

Nope, UK is not part of Europe anymore ;)

Add to that, that all these old UK houses have about as much insulation as a cereal box.

A Bedouin outfit might not fit socially, but a loose summer dress might work just as well.

So as a counter to the "pants for women" movement, let's start a "summer dresses for everyone" movement.

Throwing around the names of fallacies that don't apply instead of actual arguments doesn't further your cause just as much as you might think it does.

The no true Scotsman fallacy applies if:

• Person A makes a generalized statement ("No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge")
• That statement is falsified by providing a counter-example ("I know a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge")
• Person A does not back away from the original falsified statement but instead modifies the original statement and signals that they did modify that statement ("Well, no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge")

The main issue here is that using this fallacy, the claim becomes a non-falsifiable tautology. Every Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge is not a true Scotsman, thus the claim becomes always true by excluding every counter-example.

Let's apply that to the situation at hand.

• Genius@lemmy.zip made the statement that communism can work, providing an example where it apparently did work. This statement is not generalized, so the first condition for the true Scotsman fallacy already doesn't apply.
• Maalus@lemmy.world provided a counter-example, where communism didn't work. This doesn't actually contradict the first statement, because Genius@lemmy.zip never claimed that communism always works, so providing a single counter-example doesn't negate the statement that communism can work.
• Genius@lemmy.zip then pointed out that USSR states never actually claimed to have achieved communism, and that statement is true. According to USSR doctrine, the goal was to get to communism at some point, but that point was never reached. While this can sound like an appeal to purity, there's no basis for a "no true Scotsman" fallacy here.

Please read up on your fallacies before throwing around the names of them.

When you claim that something is a fallacy, even though the fallacy you claim doesn't actually apply, then you are doing so to discredit the whole argument without actually engaging with it. This is a perfect example of the Strawman argument, which itself is a fallacy.

The same is true for capitalism too, though.

If you work in your own little company or if you are self-employed, then the "mission" of your work might be important to you and a source of motivation.

But if you work in a huge corporation, hardly anything you do actually matters. If don't perform at 100% and instead slack off, there are other people doing the same work. And if everyone slacks off, then they just hire more people. And even if the whole department underperforms, there are other departments that rake in the money.

And whether the company thrives or goes under, your input as a lowly grunt wouldn't have made a difference anyway. Even as a mid-level manager your input wouldn't have made a difference.

Years of my work at my job can be wiped out with one email from the CEO.

Literally the only difference between capitalism and communism when it comes to that is whether the CEO wipes out my work or the state.

I think your argument is a bit besides the point.

The first issue we have is that intelligence isn't well-defined at all. Without a clear definition of intelligence, we can't say if something is intelligent, and even though we as a species tried to come up with a definition of intelligence for centuries, there still isn't a well-defined one yet.

But the actual question here isn't "Can AI serve information?" but is AI an intelligence. And LLMs are not. They are not beings, they don't evolve, they don't experience.

For example, LLMs don't have a memory. If you use something like ChatGPT, its state doesn't change when you talk to it. It doesn't remember. The only way it can keep up a conversation is that for each request the whole chat history is fed back into the LLM as an input. It's like talking to a demented person, but you give that demented person a transcript of your conversation, so that they can look up everything you or they have said during the conversation.

The LLM itself can't change due to the conversation you are having with them. They can't learn, they can't experience, they can't change.

All that is done in a separate training step, where essentially a new LLM is generated.

Sure, lossy compression is lossy, but that wasn't my point. My point was that data corruption in information-dense formats is more critical than in low-density formats.

To take your example of the vacation photos: If you have a 100 megapixel HDR photo and you lose 100 bytes of data, you will lose a few pixels and you won't even notice the change unless you zoom in quite far.

Compress these pictures down to fit on the floppy from your example (that would be ~73kb per photo), then losing 100 bytes of data will now be very noticeable in the picture, since you just lost ~0.1% of the whole data. Not taking the specifics of compression algorithms into account, you just lost 1 in every 1000 pixels, which is a lot.

High resolution low information density formats allow for quite a lot of damage before it becomes critical.

High information density formats on the other hand are quite vulnerable to critical data loss.

To show what I mean, take this image:

I saved it as BMP and then ran a script over it that replaces 1% of all bytes with a random byte. This is the result:

(I had to convert the result back to jpg to be able to upload it here.)

So even with a total of 99865 bytes replaced with random values, the image of an apple is clearly visible. There are a few small noise spots here and there, but the overall picture is still fine and if you print it as a photo, it's likely that these spots won't even be visible.

As a comparison, I now saved the original image as JPEG and also corrupted 1% of all bytes the same way. This here's the result. Gimp and many other file viewers can't open the file at all any more. Chrome can open it, and it looks like this:

The same happens with audio CDs. Audio CDs use uncompressed "direct" data, just like BMP. Data corruption only affects the data at the point of the corruption. That means, if one bit is unreadable, you probably won't be able to notice at all, and even if 1% of all data on the CD is corrupt, you will likely only notice a slightly elevated noise level, even though 1% data loss is an enormous amount.

If you instead use compressed formats (even FLAC) or if it's actual data and not media, a single illegible bit might destroy the whole file, because each bit of data depends on the information earlier in the file, so if one bit is corrupted, everything after that bit might become unreadable.

That's why your audio CD is still legible far beyond its expiry date, but a CD-R containing your backup data might not.

Again, these data retention time spans don't mean that after that time all data on the device disappears at once, but that until that time every single bit of data on your device is preserved. After that you might start to experience data loss, usually in the form of single bits or bytes failing.

Edit: Just for fun, this is what the BMP looks like with 95% corruption:

Even with this massive amount of damage, the image is still recognizable.

Edit 2: Due to a mistake in the script, this image is actually 61.3% corrupted, not 95%, but that's still a massive amount of corruption and the image is still clearly recognizable.

PET bottle recycling is the only part of plastics recycling that actually works. Making sure the bottle caps are also correctly returned to recycling plants is a good goal. Also it makes picking up litter a little easier, because now you only need to pick up one thing instead of two.

Btw, this is why clothing/bags/... made out of recycled plastic bottles is actually a terrible idea, because once the PET is out of the bottle recycling stream it is permanently removed from this recycling loop and new PET needs to be produced to compensate.

It's always a game of statistics.

You might have some 20yo disks that play fine, but there's enough 10yo disks that don't play fine. Also, especially with audio disks, having some data loss on them won't be noticeable. You could probably have up to 10% of data loss on the CD without hearing much of a difference.

Things are very different for data storage though. Here losing a single bit (e.g. of an encrypted/compressed file) might make the whole file unreadable. And if it's a critical file that might make the whole disk useless.

Audio CD is a very low-data-density format. There's a ton of data on there that doesn't matter (as exemplified by the fact that MP3 CDs can easily hold 6 times as much audio as a regular, uncompressed Audio CD). This low data density creates redundancy.

The data retention values above aren't about "After X years all of the data disappears" but about "This is how long the data will be fully retained without a single bit of data loss".

I also have HDDs from ~2000 that still work fine. The probably oldest piece of tech I own is a Gameboy, which has its BIOS in a ROM, and that one still works fine, even though it's older than 30 years now. But for one I don't own enough Gameboys to know whether I got an outlier here and I don't have the means to check if every single bit on that ROM is still identical to the original.

According to Google, burned CDs and DVDs retain data for 5-10 years.

SSDs are between a few years and a few decades, depending on the age, type and quality of the SSD. Same goes for USB sticks.

HDDs are between 10 and 20 years.

Tape drives are at 30+ years.