Haha. I used Lemmy.ml for a little while, and I noticed that it had a lot of pro-China posts and tankies, to the point that I found it likely to be state-sponsored propaganda. It’s reassuring to hear that someone else noticed the bias.

The lack of physical accountability, the inherent difficulty of text communication (avoiding ambiguity without the help of a face or body language), all this tends to make people into worse versions of themselves.

This is so true, and I hate it. I actually find Nextdoor quite refreshing because people are posting as their real selves, and nobody wants to be known as the local asshole. (Before someone makes an assumption, I’m not suggesting that we de-anonymize every social media platform. I just like having a platform that isn’t anonymous.)

Reminds me of the Quietus suicide kits in Children of Men.

Or better yet: Use the tool for one’s own goals.

In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov predicted that eventually, nearly everything on Earth would be automated, leading to mass unemployment. He then predicted that the “excess population” would move to other star systems, which served 3 purposes: reducing unemployment on earth, providing a meaningful existence for the extrasolar colonists, and spreading humanity throughout the galaxy.

I can’t tell whether you’re being downvoted because people don’t like the china-dog-eating stereotype, or because this is not the correct answer to “why China?”.

It’s hard for me to forget the video with a pile of dogs skinned alive and still moving.

There are so many precious details. The look of jealousy on the dog’s face as the dolphin-man-kebab and his woman are copulating. The dog-baby nursing. The five-o’clock shadow on the lonely dolphin-man-kebab.

Sure, but are you big-endian or little-endian?

Dey already buns

I am a simple man. I see a catloaf, I upvote.

You are both right. Data centers have both data storage and processing.

Ask Claude lol

Actually, “majority-rule (Condorcet) methods of ranked voting uniquely minimize the number of spoiled elections by restricting them to voting cycles, which are rare in ideologically-driven elections.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem

Striving to maximize profit is what companies do. Blaming them is not useful. Instead, advocate for and promote government policies that would disincentivize fossil fuel use, like carbon taxes.

They only paid $470 million (equivalent to $1.03 billion in 2024)?? That’s not even 56 k$ (2024) per person. What in the fuck.

The whole Linux??

It’s actually even worse than just taxpayers paying businesses: Since the US doesn’t have the tax revenue to pay the businesses, it will need to take out more debt to pay them. So the taxpayers will not only pay the businesses, but they will also pay interest. (That is, if you believe that the US will be able to stabilize its debt before defaulting. At the rate we’re going, with the looter class taking US government funds, the US will end up defaulting before taxpayers have a chance to pay down the debt. To be clear, a default would be far more painful than the austerity required to stabilize the debt.)

Also that the president has authority over the military (as opposed to Congress), because “you can’t have a coup if your executive is already a dictator” taps head

I agree that the literal text is what matters. There have been some neat attempts to write laws as code, which would allow them to be tested for constitutionality, for correctness, and also how they would fare in extreme circumstances. Unfortunately, I am concerned that even if laws were code (like a function that accepts parameters and returns a criminal sentence, if any), the laws could still be exploited be providing bogus inputs. I’m assuming that there would still be a corruptible being enforcing the law, whether human or strong AI.