rsuri

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Q: “Are we doomed?” A: “We would be, if not for the amazing developments in renewable energy.” ( powering-the-planet.ghost.io )

I wasn't aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.

rsuri ,

We would be, if not for Devo

rsuri ,

Going the whole distance in QWOP

rsuri ,

I think it makes sense to care more about problems that are solvable. If anyone out there has a realistic plan to reduce the suffering of the people of Gaza in any sort of lasting manner, I've yet to hear it.

But people spray painting the library? Yeah that can be solved. Report them to the police, take pictures. No tanks necessary.

rsuri ,

Now imagine this happens in a remote area with no cell coverage. In Arizona those are a thing too.

What do you think the Great Filter is?

The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi...

rsuri ,

There's a lot of possibilities.

My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we'd have an explanation by now. It could be that it's an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with "intelligent" but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don't build civilizations or explore much.

Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don't) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that's invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can't be part of the wave function. So there.

rsuri ,

I don't know if the type of matter matters, rather I'm basing in on the idea that measurement collapses the wave function, and consciousness does measure things

rsuri ,

I'd suspect it's reaction to large cultural shifts in the last couple of decades - including gay and trans rights, George Floyd and increased racial integration in media, me too, etc. For whatever reason, perhaps loss aversion, many people tend to react angrily and violently to change and the threat of change. Perhaps it's analogous to how communist movements in the early 20th century led to fascist movements a decade or two later.

I also don't think it's the US only, so you can't put it all on Trump. I'd argue Trump and similar figures around the world are the result of the above counter-reaction.

rsuri ,

The heat hasn't killed me yet

rsuri ,

"Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events," the report says.

First administration: "We must do something about the asteroid. I've started a plan to divert it, but it'll take several years."

Second administration: "The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office."

Third administration: "Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there's just too much political resistance to solving it. Let's focus on other priorities that we can solve."

rsuri ,

I mean do girls actually like that thin moustache? And I feel like if I walked around in one of those velvet jacket things everyone would just be creeped out and/or think I'm wearing it inside out. And I'd be hot, like sweaty kind of hot.

rsuri ,

He deserves to lose every dollar, it's the most arrogant business move in history and he disrupted thousands of lives of workers with good jobs in the process. Unfortunately it's only like 10% of his net worth, he's the one who will suffer the least relatively speaking.

Why are fuel perks at grocery stores so ubiquitous?

This seems insane to me. I live in a city where maybe 50-60% of people have cars, and most don't drive them that much. Yet every grocery store I'm aware of with the sole exception of the expensive Whole Foods has a fuel rewards points program. Reasons this should be controversial enough to enable a low-cost alternative:...

rsuri ,

Wear and tear doesn't kill a car; rust does.

Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity?

Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being...

rsuri ,

We talk about positive things.

Like Linux.

rsuri ,

I gotta wonder if there's one of those internet laws like "The dumber the opinion, the more attention it gets"

rsuri ,

I've been using deepstatemap.live which has proven accurate and reasonably up to date in the past. When things are moving fast though it may fall behind.

There's a bit of uncertainty principle at work. The more accurate the data, the less up to date it's gonna be.

rsuri ,

How would it though? It probably didn't have any images like this in the train-ing data.

rsuri ,

This is the problem with social media. The dumbest opinions get spread not because they have a good point or even advance the discussion, but because they're dumb and we like to look at dumb opinions for entertainment value.

rsuri ,

That's the thing about memes. They're not really a rational form of discussing a topic, and tend to exploit emotions to boost their spread. But it seems to be more or less the only form of discussing things nowadays. The result is that as a society we no longer solve anything, and only work together to make things worse now.

rsuri ,

Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”

This is the same problem that all these "free speech platforms" keep running into. Some people will abuse free speech - if nothing else, I think everyone can agree spam is a type of abusive speech. But the difference between abusive speech and ordinary speech isn't a sharp line, and the definitions of "abuse" will vary. So there needs to be some mechanism or rules for deciding what that line is. But all the people that create these platforms instead wanna pretend that line doesn't exist, so they don't create a means of determining it. So then "abuse" becomes whatever the users demand and/or the decisionmakers decide it is. Which is exactly the same as having no free speech to begin with.

rsuri ,

We create concepts like soup because they're useful, not because such concepts represent the true underlying state of the universe. So whether a cereal is a soup depends on the reason you care about soups.

rsuri ,

He clearly has no personal convictions. He acts entirely like someone who is working a job, and that job is to help Trump get elected.

rsuri ,

The First Amendment means the government can't punish you for speech. That's a good rule, and yes it means that even deplorable speech shouldn't be punished by the government. Because "deplorable" speech at various times in American history could have meant anti-slavery speech, pro-lgbt speech, anti-war speech, etc.

rsuri ,

If you assume:

  1. X is a bad thing (either because it promotes bad ideas, or because it crowds out better platforms, or some other reason)
  2. The more users and functionality X has, the more powerful it will be.

Then removing functionality from X is a good thing.

rsuri ,

As productivity increases, artificial scarcity becomes necessary to maintain pre-existing levels of inequality.

[Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism?

Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don't come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don't really get upset by it...

rsuri ,

Do-gooder derogation

rsuri , (edited )

There's 2 kinds of evidence.

  • Circumstantial evidence - relies on an inference to connect it to the conclusion (e.g. guy saying before hand he won't kill himself).
  • Direct evidence - no additional inference/evidence is needed (e.g. video of a guy going up to the car and shooting him).

The guy saying he won't kill himself requires inferring that he's being truthful when he said it and that he didn't change his mind. It's not non-evidence, it does point to suicide being less likely. But it's far from conclusive. If there's no sign of entering the vehicle or that a struggle occurred, then I'd argue that far outweighs his prior statement.

They just happened to work at the same company and die right before they could testify on the same thing.

That's also a common misunderstanding, at least regarding the first (I'm not as familiar with the second). I'm a bit unclear on the details of the deposition - which side wanted it and was asking the questions, etc. (detailed here) but whatever the case, it was Boeing that demanded he come back for one more day. So if Boeing wanted him to not testify that day, they'd just send him home as originally planned. The only reason they'd do it then was to silence him generally...but doing it in a way that draws so much suspicion to them seems like an implausibly bad decision. Then again, it is Boeing. (Note that this is also circumstantial evidence, and requires assuming that Boeing isn't so dumb as to kill a witness in the middle of their own deposition, which may not be warranted).

Edit: corrected my own misunderstanding of deposition

rsuri ,

Well first thing he's gonna do is pardon himself. That's pretty much certain. Then for every executive position he'll pick a lobbyist or corporate officer from the relevant regulated industries because that's what he did last time. Then I expect him to just keep campaigning as if he never got the job as president, because again that's pretty much what he did last time. Oh yeah, and tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, because yet again, it's what he did last time.

rsuri ,

No, I'm gonna sit back and laugh as a bunch of guys who couldn't schedule a meeting at the four seasons try to overthrow the world's oldest democracy.

rsuri ,

According to wikipedia:

Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections.

Feel free to edit if you disagree.

rsuri ,

According to the report, the sales decline came from all across Asia. Net sales were down in Greater China (PRC, Taiwan & Hong Kong), Japan, and the Rest of Asia Pacific, while the Americas and Europe saw an insignificant change that can be rounded up to 0%.

This makes sense. Apple has its status as "the one and only smartphone" in the US, but in other countries buying a phone that costs a tiny fraction as much is probably a bigger draw and has less social stigma.

Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites ( www.theverge.com )

In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first...

rsuri ,

We need Yahoo back. Just a bunch of categories, where anyone can put their site under the right category.

rsuri ,

Bumble is pretty much the only one they don't own. The only other one I can think of is coffee meets bagel, does anyone still use that?

rsuri ,
  • Trump's lawyers would argue that Biden can order Trump's execution without any punishment, but that it would not cause him to win the next election because the military and other federal officials are not immune and are "obligated" not to follow illegal orders. So basically the argument is that illegal orders are unlikely to be followed.
  • Problem with this argument is that the president has the pardon power, which means he could promise to pardon people for following his illegal orders.
  • But the problem with that argument is that some believe the president could pardon himself, so maybe that situation is already a reality even if the president is not immune
  • What would actually happen? It seems like in both Watergate and Jan 6, some people did refuse to follow corrupt orders. But in the case of Watergate where there was more time and a more intelligent corrupt president, that wasn't itself a major problem. In Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, he forced his AGs to resign until he landed on future Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who carried out Nixon's illegal order to fire a special prosecutor. The bad news for Nixon is that the move was so unpopular it eventually led to his resignation as he probably would've been impeached otherwise.
rsuri ,

I just created !justtext in case you wanna just post the text instead of picture, because I'm perhaps irrationally annoyed by pictures of text.

rsuri ,

Texas never attracted techies, it attracted a few Republican tech CEOs with disproportionate shares of power. I've always turned down recruiters trying to get me to move there regardless of how good the job is on paper. If I've got options, I'm choosing to live on one of the coasts. There's nothing for me in Texas. I mean I've been to Bucees once, it's worth visiting. But I'm gonna guess the novelty is probably over by the second visit.

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