I guess I didn’t drill down into the exploitation aspect, yeah. The people actually doing the jobs I don’t know how to do–mining, farming, sewing, etc.–are at this point almost entirely disadvantaged people in other countries, who are being woefully underpaid and subjected to terrible conditions. (A lot of farming is also done here, but it’s still by exploited foreign workers, so…) And a bunch of that relies on other systems too, like farming being done by as few workers as it is depends on fertilizers from the petrochemical industries, which are hurting people EVERYWHERE. I wouldn’t be able to afford anything if it weren’t discounted in this way. Even if there was no actual apocalypse, and only the exploitation went away, it’s not at all clear to me that I would have a way to keep myself alive.

If the AMOC shuts down, all bets are off.

I mean I’m about a billion dollars short of being a billionaire, and I don’t know how to live without exploiting labor either. I can’t farm, I can’t hunt, I can’t identify edible berries, roots, and mushrooms, I can’t sew beyond fixing a button. I know a lot about mechanisms, but it’s far from clear to me I could do anything useful in that field once the electricity is out, let alone once source metal starts getting hard to find. Everything would get so much harder so quickly. Hell, I don’t even know how to dig a latrine that’ll prevent the water supply from being contaminated, assuming we can find a water supply. (On the plus side, sources of pollution in water supplies should start to fall apart pretty fast.)

I dunno. I just think everyone thinking about the collapse wildly underestimates how hard everything will be. I can’t really picture my sorry ass lasting long at all.

We coulda had Local Loop Unbundling all this time.

I mean, redraw this graph as “happiness” vs “year of birth” and it’ll look way less optimistic!

"Just glue some gears on it and call it steampunk…"🎶

thanks!

So is it being used as slang outside the context of describing people as non-Jewish? I grew up in Skokie, IL, so I was familiar with the yiddish term, but I haven’t heard this new usage. Are non-jewish kids online using “goyim” to refer to outsiders of some other in-group?

To quote professor Farnsworth, “No, no, no one’s saying that. But I’m certainly thinking it loudly.”

They do very occasionally blunder into something that has merits. Like, they rescheduled marijuana, and they’re fast-tracking research on therapeutic psilocybin and MDMA. Those are positive things, broadly speaking. Removing the tax on tipped workers was also helpful for some working-class people.

I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head, but part of that is probably availability bias: the vaguely positive stuff that they do is a lot less emotionally charged, and therefore less memorable, than the wildly awful stuff they also constantly do.

I thought of another one. This is an odd one, because I think the dev is actually quite well known: it’s Yahtzee Croshaw, formerly of Zero Punctuation and now of Fully Ramblomatic. He’s made a number of games over the years, but one that almost nobody ever mentions anymore is Poacher. (Note: link is to Archive.org rather than Steam; I don’t think the game is available on Steam.) I didn’t actually beat this one, as it ramps up quite a bit in difficulty as it goes on, but the basic controls and whatnot are very nice, and the humor is great. Here’s Wot Rock, Paper, Shotgun Thought about it, since it’s a bit of a faff to actually install at this point and Archive doesn’t offer reviews and whatnot.

The catch is that it’s “unlimited” in that sense that the mobile companies have made people accept now, i.e., deprioritized. I’m on Visible, which is Verizon’s MVNO; my plan has unlimited deprioritized everything, and it’s $25/mo, with $5/mo discount for the first two years so I’m actually paying $20/mo for now. It’s mostly good enough for my purposes; I’m usually on Wifi anyway. When I was leaving a protest and turned my phone back on, I couldn’t get enough access to check the bus schedule or text my family, so that was frustrating; dense crowds are a problem. But I was previously paying like $130/mo for Verizon, so it’s more than worth putting up with. I got some mesh radios for emergency comms.

I’ve recommended this before, so it’s possible people will have heard of this from me, but Gateways by Smudged Cat Games is pretty great. It’s a puzzle platformer but it gets very, very complicated as you go on, especially once you unlock the ability to use all the different mechanics at once. It’s a pretty smooth learning curve up to that point, though.

It still cracks me up that they at one point released a Thanksgiving themed Malört. It had flavorings like cranberry sauce and turkey gravy. I realize they were just playing into the social media coverage they’d get for such absolute fuckery, but god, they really know their beverage’s core brand is just “disgusting, but with alcohol.”

The noise is created by cooling, and AI data centers require so much more cooling that it’s hard to even compare them. The kind of server rack that would run something like Lemmy might draw 8-12kW of power. A new nVidia NVL72 rack for AI workloads, running the new B300 gpus, draws about 132-140kW. All that power ultimately has to be removed by cooling. You know how a regular laptop is basically silent, but a gaming laptop running something heavy will make quite a racket with its fan? It’s like that, but scaled up to the size of Manhattan.

I’m not a huge Marvel fan, but I really enjoyed Legion. Pretty much all the content warnings, though.

“Do you guys not have phones?”

I’m not sure it’s AI. There are people who build screen-accurate prop replicas as a hobby. Here’s a post by a guy who made a version of the beads. https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/the-rock-vx-gas-build.332887/

Yeah, it’s the person I was replying to who was saying that Bradbury made a mistake by saying 451°F, and that it should have been 451°C. I cited the range to demonstrate that Bradbury’s number was roughly correct and 451°C is very much not.

This does not appear to be correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature gives the point for paper as “218–246 °C (424–475 °F)” which roughly matches the title as published.