Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)B

balsoft

@ balsoft @lemmy.ml

Posts
8
Comments
977
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • We can't even pump fuel anymore without holding a digital billboard (Netherlands)

    Jump

  • Or we could do the sensible thing and make a few taxpayer-funded news agencies, same as with the rest of public services. UK, Canada and Australia have public broadcasters, and while fundamentally they are still tools of imperialist propaganda they are usually more accurate with their reporting and truthful with their journalism than the billionaire-owned ad-ridden slop.

    The rest could then be funded through a mix of grants, subscriptions and volunteers.

    Continuing with the MIC/wars analogy: "without MIC and wars to fund it we wouldn't have done the research for transistors/ICs/microwaves/radar/...". It's obviously a false dichotomy designed to normalize wars of aggression. It's the same here, brainworm slop and paid slop are not the only two alternatives.

  • Just one

    Jump

  • Neoliberal western democracy is not the only style of democracy possible

  • We can't even pump fuel anymore without holding a digital billboard (Netherlands)

    Jump

  • The question is not whether they support a business model, it's whether they are good for humanity. And they are bad for humanity from a socioeconomic perspective because it is labor power spent with negative net use value produced.

    Compare it with imperialist wars: they are the business model of the entire MIC, and yet I hope you agree that wars of aggression are bad.

  • Just one

    Jump

  • I think "eat the rich" implies also a significant change in the economic system towards something actually democratic and scientific.

  • Technology Connections - You are being misled about renewable energy technology.

    Jump

  • I think all the information is pretty well-known in this community, but here's a summary:

    • Renewables (specifically solar + batteries) are an inevitable future of energy production due to technological advancements and economies of scale improvements; you should not oppose them but welcome them
      • We are at a tipping point where solar + batteries is now the cheapest energy source available
      • Land use for solar farms is not a big issue, they are much more energy efficient per unit area than the ethanol corn that currently plagues the US
      • Replacing all ethanol corn fields with solar farms would make almost twice as much energy as the US grid is currently producing
    • Renewables are better than fossil fuels because they do not require continuous extraction; when a solar panel or battery has been "used up" and is degraded, it can be recycled, whereas fossil fuels can only be burned once after extraction
      • The end goal is an almost-closed-loop system for all energy production, similar to what we have with lead-acid batteries already
      • Recycling solar panels is relatively easy because they are mostly glass and aluminum, which we know how to recycle well, and we could probably figure out silicon too
      • Recycling batteries is a harder problem but possible too if we put some effort in; currently the recycling capacity is lacking because there's not enough batteries being recycled, since most of them are still working fine in EVs sold since the start of EV boom
      • Worst-case, we can literally just grind up batteries into battery mush and refine it, same as we do with ores from which the raw materials come in the first place, but likely something better is possible
    • Alec describes his personal politics, how he values labor and working-class people, and how he thinks immigrants are hard-working people who need to be welcomed and cared for
      • Trump and Republicans as a whole are fascists and lie constantly, which needs to be called out and stopped
      • ICE must be abolished and its thugs tried for their crimes
      • Democrats are not doing enough, and in fact are pretty bad on some points, but it's still better to vote for them
      • People need to organize with their neighbors, care for each other first and foremost, and defend themselves against the government

    Alec's personal views are a relief, I think it's a shame he didn't go deeper into them before (IIRC he had a video where he called out right-wing misinfo but stopped short of any direct calls for action). I suppose the contrast between his usual "tech presenter/science explainer" and this clearly righteous political call for action might get through to some people better.

  • What Happens to Linux After Linus Torvalds? We Finally Have the Answer to This Uncomfortable Question

    Jump

  • So yeah, there's no exact answer to "what happens to Linux after Torvalds", it's more of "who gets to add more maintainers to torvalds/linux.git if nobody merges things in there for 72 hours". I suppose Linus is confident that the system of distributed maintainers is robust enough to survive his & gregkh's incapacitation, and the only remaining point of failure is access to the central repo itself. I think he is underestimating the governance upheaval that would happen if he was to disappear, so I hope that he puts some more details about his views on future project governance in writing.

  • Shave your wardrobe

    Jump

  • Yeah, hearing stats about the average amount of times an article of clothing is worn in the west (which is somewhere between 7 and 10 times) is insane to me. I usually wear things until the fabric is too tired and fragile to be patched up, which is typically hundreds of times and many dozens of washes. My favorite pair of trousers has been going strong for definitely more than a thousand days of intense use, including hiking and other sports; they are close to giving up but still not quite there yet.

    The mindset of buying clothes (or boots) to wear them less than a hundred times before discarding is just beyond me, and I'm way above the poverty line. From what I hear there are people who never wash some of their clothing categories (e.g. underwear), just throwing them out when they get dirty, and it drives me mad.

    Like, some poor person was paid $2 per day or so to saw this in the heat of SE Asian summer, then it was shipped half way across the planet to you, and you throw all this effort away because "it's out of fashion" or "it has a small hole in it"? Really?

  • OpenStreetMap is concerned: thousands of AI bots are collecting data

    Jump

  • Do you prefer fluffy UI over Liquid Glass?

    Jump

  • Only if the touchscreen also has a fluffy texture.

  • OpenStreetMap is concerned: thousands of AI bots are collecting data

    Jump

  • Fuck AI companies! There is good faith use and then there's whatever the fuck this is. For some reason apps that are actually useful (OsmAnd, CoMaps, Mapy, ...) all figured out how to mirror OSM data on their own servers so that it's only downloaded once per app once per month or so, and then users never interact with osm.org. Meanwhile a trillion-dollar industry can't figure this shit out!

  • European propaganda DESTROYED

    Jump

  • Honestly it's not the worst idea, the french have tried something like that during one of their revolutions.

    Semi-relatedly, I'm salty they didn't push for duodecimal numbers and base metric on that, it would incorporate the only good part of imperial system & 12-based time system, not only into measurements but also all other aspects of life.

    Then they could make time more consistent too, maybe have like 10000 (20736 in decimal) "metric seconds" in a day (which would mean 1 "metric second" ≈ 4 "normal" seconds) and derive stuff from there (e.g. 100 "metric seconds" in a "metric minute", 10 "metric minutes" in a "metric hour", 10 "metric hours" in a "metric day"). Would be really quite neat.

  • European propaganda DESTROYED

    Jump

  • Of the two, Celsius is less arbitrary because it is based on actual measurable reproducible things and not "we threw in some salts in water, and guesstimated a human body temperature". It also makes a lot of sense in our post-industrial society because we do/don't want to freeze/boil water almost every day for a variety of uses. Water is both an extremely important substance for humans and its freezing/boiling points occur in everyday life (unlike air or metals).

  • European propaganda DESTROYED

    Jump

  • To be fair, it's the other way around. Kelvin scale is Celsius scale shifted by -273 ℃.

  • Straight into my adblocker

    Jump

  • Ads aren't just verbal, they are also visual. A "strong brand" would be instantly recognizable even if you don't know the language at all.

    E.g. you probably almost immediately know what this is, without even knowing the alphabet:

    That's kind of the point, advertisements are intentionally designed as brain worms which interact with deep parts of your brain and get you to instinctively associate them with something (ideally positive, but even general awareness is beneficial to the brand).

  • True story that might have happened today

    Jump

  • That's true, for me the main issue with any automation under capitalism is that it brings yet more power to the corpos and the billionaires and takes away power from the labor.

    In this particular case it also sucks because the end product of genAI is soulless slop, and video genAI is quite a power hog. I agree that it's ok for assisting developers/writers/artists/video editors in boring repetitive tasks.

  • True story that might have happened today

    Jump

  • I think LLMs are neat and useful tools in some circumstances. So I don't hate "AI", I hate the billionaires who are pushing it down our throats, or trying to replace us.

  • France will replace Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and others with its own sovereign video conferencing application "Visio" for public officials

    Jump

  • Yes, the reasoning behind this is sad, but the outcome is very positive.

  • France will replace Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and others with its own sovereign video conferencing application "Visio" for public officials

    Jump

  • These particular news are based and a long-term good for the humanity. Moving from spying corpo slop to an open-source solution is a win-win for the french people. Sad that it is only happening now, this should have been done decades ago, the US empire and its corporations have always been evil. Now they are just showing their true face to europe and the US population.

  • Paper is the new privacy measure.

    Jump

  • People's opinions are measurably linked to the opinions of their (perceived) peer group. Conservatives were not born evil, they become evil after hearing evil bullshit from everyone and everything around them. That's why "brainwashing" in the form of repeating the same lie over and over from various sources works so well in convincing people it's the truth. Ban it, punish the liars, and the influence is reduced significantly. Invest in better education for the general population, specifically around critical thinking and media literacy (ideally something based on dialectical/historical materialism, which seems to be the best philosophical framework for understanding social realities) & historical education about dangers of fascism and capitalism, and the society gets a good anti-fascist vaccine for a couple generations at least.

  • pics @lemmy.world
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
    OC

    Desert Sunrise

  • Photography @lemmy.ml
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
    OC

    Desert Sunrise

  • pics @lemmy.world
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
    OC

    Moonrise at sunset

  • Photography @lemmy.ml
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
    OC

    Moonrise at sunset

  • pics @lemmy.world
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
    OC

    Winter Dawn

  • Photography @lemmy.ml
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
    OC

    Winter Dawn

  • pics @lemmy.world
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
    OC

    Late spring in Georgia

  • Photography @lemmy.ml
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
    OC

    Late spring in Georgia