Marginal cost doesn’t always decrease. More people buying gold or whatever won’t decrease the price of gold. The cheapest way to feed cattle is to just let them graze, but there isn’t enough land on Earth for everyone to eat as much beef as Americans, even if using intensive agriculture to grow feed (which degrades the soil over time and results in large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions). I don’t think there’s enough land on Earth to maintain the current human population for very long. I.e. I think we are in the overshoot phase of a boom and bust population dynamic. Saw this graphic a while back, and it’s wild how much of the biomass we’ve took over:

Yeah, I live in a neighborhood that’s kinda in-between suburban and rural. I.e. a neighborhood of 1/4 acre lots surrounded by mostly protected shrubland. The deer seem to have learned to stay in the neighborhood where they can’t be hunted. They often sleep in people’s back and sometimes even front yards. I don’t really mind them, except for the fact that they’ll eat almost anything I try to plant, and even jump my backyard fence to eat their favorite plants.

Some people’s aversion of algorithms on the fediverse kind of reminds me of people’s aversion of GMO food. Genetically modifying rice to contain more vitamin D is probably good; genetically modifying vegetables to contain more cyanide would probably be bad. Algorithms don’t have to be built to maximize “engagement;” they can be designed to maximize other metrics, or balance multiple metrics, or be user-customizable.

IMO, Mastadon is much worse off for their refusal to implement any kind of algorithm outside their “explore” feed. When I tried using Mastodon, search was unhelpfully in chronological order, and my home feed just got overtaken by the people that post the most. In contrast, Lemmy’s handling of algorithms is pretty good, imo.

As bad as search engines are now, they’d be even worse if they just gave you results in chronological order.

Thanks. So much better than RHVoice.

Easy enough to scroll past. Hexbear was a bit annoying with what looked like brigading sometimes. Don’t recall anything too egregious from lemmygrad and don’t recall beehaw being tankie. Awful.systems is very toxic, but I’d rather just choose not to participate myself than my home instance making that decision for me. On that note, lemmy needs tools so users can block users/communities/instances; I think some proprietary apps support it, but I’m not going to use proprietary software if I don’t have to.

What tankie instances has sh.itjust.works de-federated from? And any discussions as to why? I moved here from lemmy.world, specifically because they were too ban/block/defed happy.

Worked manual jobs (assembly line) right out of highschool (well fast food during highschool too), and absolutely hated how boring it was to me. I’m not a social person, and used to have really bad social anxiety. I’ve always had an interest in computers, for whatever reason, so after a few years of manual labor, decided to go to college for that. Also, I lived in a very depressed area, and the jobs I had were very low paying, to the point I couldn’t afford to move out from my parents, so something had to change.

Anyways, I made the right choice, because I’m pretty good at what I do, and I love encountering and solving difficult problems.

While in college, I did work at a metal fab shop for a summer, and I could’ve totally seen myself doing that as well. It wasn’t mind-numbing like assembly line work, did involve problem solving, and the tools and machines were “cool.”

I’m unfamiliar with that delivery uniform, maybe it’s another country’s postal service, but the USPS has had a kind of “higher purpose” associated with it. E.g.

The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

I think the ultra wealthy and powerful understand that revolution becomes more likely as the majority’s material conditions declines, so their endgame is to throw just enough crumbs to the majority so that they don’t want to risk losing those crumbs. Many of today’s ultra wealthy and powerful seem exceptionally out of touch with reality and dumb though, so idk. Some are accelerationists (i.e. e/acc), and purposely avoid taking into account possible negative consequences.

Lol. Bad joke. What I was getting at is people used to hang out at bars and drink more (alcohol use was worse). More generally, it’s a lack of third places and car-based city design. More, and more engaging in-home entertainment/Internet also probably plays a part. Though, it’s probably not a completely new phenomenon either, judging from art like Taxi Driver, Catcher In The Rye, etc. So, toxic or even plain masculinity likely makes it harder to make and keep close friends.

I’d bet female loneliness is also rising in modern society as well, due to modern phenomenon. Humans didn’t evolve to live like we are. We used to mostly live in small, close-knit tribes.

I learned it because I had to write a WPF desktop application, so you could start with WPF tutorials. I was already very familiar with Java, which is very similar, so it wasn’t too hard. Last time I used it was in Unity. You might want to find a good free online course for C# to get a good grasp of C#/Java’s style of OOP, design patterns, and all that kind of stuff.

That’s really cool (not the auto opt-in thing). If I understand correctly, that system looks like if offers pretty strong theoretical privacy guarantees (assuming their closed-source client software works as they say, with sending fake queries and all that for differential privacy). If the backend doesn’t work like they say, they could infer what landmark is in an image when finding the approximate minimum distance to embeddings in their DB, but with the fake queries they can’t be sure which one is real. They can’t see the actual image either way as long as the “128-bit post-quantum” encryption algorithm doesn’t have any vulnerabilies (and the closed source software works as described).

He’s been consistent on these issues for a while. “Open borders? That’s a Koch brothers proposal.”

DUI laws.

I think it’s common where meat is sold in open-air markets. I read an article about the practice last year.

I just use Joplin, encrypted, and synced through dropbox. Tried logseq, but never really figured out how to use its features effectively. The notebook/note model of Joplin seems more natural to me. My coding/scripting stuff mostly just goes into git repos.

I don’t think there’s is a STEM worker shortage. IIRC, there have been something like 300k tech layoffs in the last couple years. Actual scientists and mathmeticians are extremely underpaid, but a lot of people like doing it, which is one of the reasons “citizen science” is becoming popular.

The PC I’m using as a little NAS usually draws around 75 watt. My jellyfin and general home server draws about 50 watt while idle but can jump up to 150 watt. Most of the components are very old. I know I could get the power usage down significantly by using newer components, but not sure if the electricity use outweighs the cost of sending them to the landfill and creating demand for more newer components to be manufactured.

CK2 - 400h

Fallout NV (guessing most of this has been TTW) - 190h

Stellaris - 180h

Xcom 2 - 140h

GTA 5 - 99h

Cities Skylines - 95h

Skyrim - 90h

Civ5 - 85h

Xcom - 83h

The other games I’ve played are pretty much the standard play-through times. (< 70h)