Not sure if the robbing makes the story that much worse. I feel the assault, murder and public display far outweigh the money.

This is funny. It also reflects in Lemmy. For example, take this tankie comment claiming "zelensky made having peace negotiations with putin ILLEGAL", based on an article which says "Zelensky’s decree released Tuesday declares that holding negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin has become impossible after his decision to annex four regions of Ukraine."

Then watch how mods from lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml ban users and delete comments which question their narrative.

Cherry on top: A user from this curated bubble remarks that "Nobody actually has any argument against this", because of course they are shielded from comments who pointed out the inaccuracy of the claim, and don't question it themselves.

Compare yourself:

• lemm.ee version: https://lemm.ee/comment/3929526
• lemmygrad.ml version: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2389500

Now read that comment in the basement of this thread again:

Understand we American make more lie for pleasure and entertaining. Not chinese lie. China always with great truth.

Headline:

TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED TO MONKEYS AFTER GETTING NEURALINK IMPLANTS, ACCORDING TO VETERINARY RECORDS

What are these terrible things?

Up to a dozen monkeys suffered grisly fates after receiving a Neuralink implant, including brain swelling and partial paralysis.

First is the case of the monkey "Animal 20." In December 2019, an internal part of the brain implant being inserted into the primate "broke off" during surgery. Later that night, the monkey scratched at the implant site, drawing blood, and yanked on the implant, partially dislodging it. Follow-up surgery discovered that the wound was infected, but that the placement of the implant prevented treatment. The monkey was euthanized the next month.

Before that, a female monkey designated "Animal 15" began to press her head against the ground after receiving the brain implant, pick at the site until it bled, and eventually lost coordination, shivering when personnel entered the room. Scientists discovered she had brain bleeding, and in March 2019, she too was euthanized.

The following year, a primate called "Animal 22" was put down in March 2020 after its brain implant became so loose that the screws attaching it to the skull "could easily be lifted out," according to a necropsy report.

"The failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection," the necropsy states.

As Wired notes, that statement alone seemingly contradicts Musk's claims that no monkeys directly died from Neuralink brain implants.

And so would the account of an ex-Neuralink employee, who told Wired that Musk's claims that the monkeys were already terminally ill are "ridiculous," even a "straight-up fabrication."

"We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed," the ex-employee said.

The testimony of an anonymous scientist conducting research at CNPRC seems to corroborate the ex-employee's allegations.

"These are pretty young monkeys," they told the magazine. "It's hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason."

That's like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.

I haven't seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.

Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don't speak up, I would conclude we don't have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?

Maybe it's that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.

I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.

We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.

Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.

German thread in https://feddit.de/c/deutschland about the story: https://feddit.de/post/3075089

More than 100k across Germany?

AFAIK it was 160k in Hamburg alone.

The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.

I read it as: 'They embraced, extended and extinguished what you held dear'.

Much like that comment. Can you give a better example, or express why it's a bad example? That would bring some quality in.

More mildly put, people are diverse, which is a great resource.

I want to follow communities about a wide variety of topics. Some appeal to intellectual, tech-savvy people, others don't.

If the platform is deterring to the later group, my experience suffers because I lack content in these areas.

People can use their brains in many more ways than understanding technology. Just because a person is not good in navigating technology does not mean they have no brain.

For example, I'd love to see more going on in communities about performative arts, philosophy, activism, regional cultural events. Occasionally, I like to peek into bubbles which are completely different from my own.

With power comes responsibility. I see it as the responsibility of people who understand technology to make it accessible to those who don't.

I'm in favor of simplifying the signup process with auto-assigning an instance. [Edit: For users coming from https://join-lemmy.org/]

For people who start using the fediverse or lemmy, the concept of federated instances is hard to understand. It also does not matter that much at this part of their journey. How about randomly assigning new users to instances which are open? This could also help with load balancing between instances.

The idea is to make entry as quick and easy as possible. Once users familiarized themselves with content and communities, they can reevaluate their 'decision' which instance they want to make their home. At this point, they have a better idea what this is all about.

Choosing an instance right from the start should still be possible, just not be the default mode. Make it a small link at the bottom 'advanced mode' or whatever, just don't scare or burden newcomers with unecessary complexity.

To answer the question directly: I think each instance can make that decision for themselves, and open or close registration accordingly. Both is fine.

The moon is essential for life on Earth.

Yes, but mostly by it's mass, and maybe by it's albedo. Is there anything else about the moon of relevance for life on Earth?

It's mass of 7 * 10^22^ kg is so enormous, it wouldn't make a dent if we add or remove hundreds of gigatons, which is far beyond our lifting capabilities at least for the next decades.

It's surface is so huge, we cannot affect it's albedo significantly.

So even if we approached the moon as a mere profit to be exploited, maximizing output and disregarding any concerns, how could this be detrimental to life on Earth?

Technically schools close every night, and kids already sleep at home.

FYI you can self-host GitLab, for example in a Docker container.

I forgot the details, but I remember vividly the strong feeling of being right about something. And then I learned I was wrong.

This was when I started to distrust that feeling. It is comforting, but not a trustworthy guide to truth.

This is not the way to go about that

What is your way to go about that?

If you aren't doing anything, what way(s) would you deem acceptable? If you know acceptable ways, why aren't you following through? Honest if-questions, not meant as assumptions.

Healthy and sustainable food seems to be a decent goal. People should be able to get behind this. So if all the disagreement is about the right approach, where are the people with the right approach, and where are all the people voicing their concern about art supporting them?

Please help me out. It feels as if people are more concerned about pieces of art which they may never see, than about healthy food, the climate, or other major issues which affect everyone.

I get why it puts people off, these points exist. I just wonder what the "right" alternative to these "wrong" approaches is, and wether the critics walk the talk.

Oh, wow. Ok, then what's the point of holding Crimea? And then, what's the point of the whole war anyways? Make peace, go home!

::: spoiler Full article

Naval Defeat: Russia’s Black Sea Fleet Has Abandoned its Critical Crimea Base

A major aim of Kremlin’s war was to guarantee security for Russian warships operating from the Sevastopol base in the Black Sea. That is in ruins as its fleet retreats from an opponent without a navy.

by Stefan Korshak | October 5, 2023, 3:06 pm

In a naval defeat of historical proportions, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (BSF) has evacuated almost all of its warships from the Sevastopol naval base in occupied Crimea and moved them to what it considers to be safer ports on the Russian mainland out of reach of Kyiv missile and drone strikes.

Satellite images published by open-source naval observers such as MT Anderson show that at least ten major fighting vessels that were previously stationed in Russia’s massive Sevastopol naval base are now moored at piers in the smaller port Novorossiysk, in Russia’s Kuban region.

The imagery suggests the Kremlin has indefinitely ended the use of the strategically located Crimean peninsula as its Black Sea base. Major BSF vessels identified in Novorossiysk include two missile-carrying frigates, three missile-carrying submarines, and five amphibious assault ships.

Six smaller missile boats and several auxiliary ships were reported to have left Sevastopol and are now based in the civilian port of Feodosia, about 150 kilometers east of Sevastopol. Novorossiysk is on the eastern Black Sea coast about 350 kilometers east of Sevastopol.

David Kezerashvili, who served as Georgia’s defense minister during the 2008 Russian invasion, said: “Ukraine has been hugely successful at targeting Russia’s navy in Crimea, with the result being that the Kremlin now feels it needs to relocate.”

Ukrainian media first spotted Russian warships withdrawing from Sevastopol, most of which later appeared in Novorossiysk, on Sep. 22-23.

The Kremlin’s effective abandonment of Sevastopol’s naval facilities followed a series of devastating Ukrainian missile and drone strikes against shore defenses and port infrastructure in recent weeks.

Among the most spectacular was a Ukrainian special forces raid on Aug. 24 which hit an early-warning radar and an S-400 air defense system on the Crimea’s extreme western shore near Cape Tarankhut.

A Sept. 13 strike by at least eight Anglo-French precision-guided cruise missiles exploited a gap created in Russian air defenses over Crimean air space to hit Sevastopol’s naval base, targeting warships tied up in military drydocks.

Although the Kremlin has claimed the damage will all be repaired, independent analysts have generally concluded that Ukrainian missiles effectively destroyed a missile-carrying submarine and an amphibious assault ship, and rendered all three of the BSF’s drydocks incapable of undertaking major ship repairs for months.

A follow-up cruise missile strike on Sept. 22 blasted the BSF’s headquarters in Sevastopol, detonating inside the building while, according to both Russian and Ukrainian news reports, a senior BSF staff meeting was in progress. At least 60 Russian staff and command officers were killed in the strike and dozens more injured, most reports said.

Since Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the BSF lost one of its original five major warships – significantly, its flagship the cruiser Moskva to an April 2022 Ukrainian anti-ship missile strike. Other Russian fleet elements known to have been sunk, destroyed or put out of action for months include at least two more heavy amphibious assault ships, a pair of landing ships, a rescue tug, a missile-armed corvette, and a minesweeper.

Abandoning the Sevastopol base is a tacit signal of acknowledgment by the Kremlin that it can no longer protect its fleet in its main Crimea base. With the Russian navy now forced to operate hundreds of kilometers further away from Ukraine, its ability to interfere with Ukrainian civilian grain exports from the ports of Odesa and Chernomorsk, or to use ship-based missiles to bombard Ukrainian cities, will be reduced but probably not ended, analysts say.

Aslan Bzhaniya, leader of the renegade Georgian region of Abkhazia, in comments carried by the Russian official news agency “Izvestiya” on Thursday and widely repeated in Russian and Ukrainian media, said Russian authorities plan to compensate for loss of capacity in Sevastopol with the construction of a new naval port in Ochamchire, a former seaside tourist resort, 45 kilometers south of the Abkhazian city of Sukhumi.

Abkhazia, with the strong support of Russian troops and weapons, gained de facto independence from Georgia in fighting which ended in 1993. The war ruined Ochamchire’s waterfront and in doing so devastated Abkhazia’s main cash industry which offered economical seaside vacations to residents of the former Soviet Union.

The Kremlin at the time said it was helping protect ethnic Abkhazians from Georgian attacks. Tbilisi said Moscow instigated the conflict to widen its control in the eastern Black Sea and to undermine Georgian sovereignty.

Imperial Russia annexed Crimea from its native Tartar tribesmen in 1783 and built the BSF home base in Sevastopol in 1804. Putin’s Russian Federation illegally annexed Crimea from independent Ukraine in 2014. At the time Moscow was renting shore basing privileges for its warships from the Ukrainian government.

Putin justified the annexation with arguments that Russia needed total control of the naval facilities in Ukrainian Crimea as a matter of Russian national security.

Kezerashvili has warned the rebasing of Russia’s fleet to ports adjacent to Georgia marked a dangerous broadening of the Russo-Ukraine war, that now threatened regional security thousands of kilometers beyond Ukraine’s borders.

“Putin is also sending a signal to the West that it needs to stay out of Georgia. The nightmare scenario for the West is that Russia starts launching attacks on Ukraine from territory that is legally Georgia’s, or alternatively that Ukraine feels obliged to strike first in Georgia’s direction,” Kezerashvili said.

“There is an urgent need now for the Western allies – the European Union, US and NATO – to act fast to prevent the spread of Russian influence in the region,” he said. :::

So much lulz in the article.

Russia’s central bank has halted the circulation of a new 1,000 ruble note after Orthodox priests complained that the image of a church dome lacked a cross – even though it does not have one in real life.

The bank had presented new designs of the 1,000 and 5,000 ruble notes earlier this week.

One of them featured two religious sites in the majority-Muslim Tatarstan republic: a minaret with an Islamic crescent moon and an Orthodox church with a dome that did not have a cross on it.

The 17th-century church’s cross was removed by Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution. The building now serves as a state museum.

But the lack of the cross quickly drew the ire of Orthodox clerics.

Pavel Ostrovsky, a priest, said on Telegram that the bill was either the result of “the stupidity of the designers” or a “deliberate provocation” by the “followers of Islam” in Tatarstan.

The celebrity priest, who has 174,000 followers on the app, said “there was no difference what the building looks like in real life” as most Russians do not know its history.

Started smoking cigarettes.

Shouldn't that be an argument to regulate it less, not "as heavily"?

Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn't be regulated as heavily.

Edit: typo

Make a comment with your conclusion and how you arrived at it.

If applicable, report the post.

As phrased in a recent anti-union campaign by Amazon: Watch out, your co-workers might be "vulnerable to organizing".

These bots merely advertise for reddit. They drown the All feed in zero engagement posts, hiding actual activity.

Experienced users might be able to handle this (although the question persists why one unresponsible bot admin should be able to force thousands of users to take action), but new Lemmy users will not look for a fix. They will leave and never come back.

These bots make Lemmy a worse and shallow copy of reddit. Please stop running them, or make it in instances which do not federate their content to the rest of Lemmy.

the platform must explicitly allow other bots to also exist for fairness sake

With platform, you mean instance or community? They can have arbitrary rules and don't have to be fair. One could say only this specific bot is allowed which we currently use, another could disallow bots unless whitelisted by the mods, or whatever.

Or do I miss a technical aspect?

A design professor actually proposed this idea to us. Make the user feel how the computer is working, so they can appreciate the result more.

First, the researchers excised the larynxes of eight newly deceased domestic cats, all of which had contracted terminal diseases, resulting in their euthanization. (The owners gave explicit consent for this removal.) The larynxes were promptly flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at -20° Celsius. They were slowly thawed at room temperature the night before the experiments. Each larynx was cleaned, photographed, and mounted on a vertical tube, which was used to supply heated air with 100 percent humidity to the larynx.

The larynxes were stabilized using LEGO blocks and 3D-printed plastic mounts, and mini-electrodes were attached to the thyroid cartilage, one on each side, to record the electroglottographic (EGG) signal. Gradually opening and closing a magnetic valve in the air supply chain controlled the subglottal pressure by pumping in air, which drove the oscillation in the mounted larynxes. (One larynx also underwent standard histological analysis, while another was CT scanned.)

The authors successfully produced purring sounds in all eight of the excised larynxes when air was pumped through them, with no need for muscle contractions—given that all the adjacent muscles had been removed when excising the larynxes. So what was driving the purrs?

Fascinating, this took a few unexpected turns.

Certainly, being that is possible. Acting on it is harder. Acting on it without being ripped to pieces by at least someone might be impossible.

what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles?

For Lemmy:

• Onboarding. Newcomers should not have to decide which instance to use. They know nothing to make that decision. An algorithm should make an educated guess. Even a random pick might be better than forcing them to choose. Manual choice should still be available as an advanced signup method, but the default should be as quick and simple as possible.
• Account Migration. The lack thereof only increases the pressure for making a good choice for your first instance. If we could easily migrate accounts, this would also ease the signup burden. 3rd party tools exist, but this should be a core feature.
• Discovery. There exist dozens of tools for discovering communities, which shows how bad the built-in search function is. This should be a core feature with no need for 3rd party tools. I should not have to care wether someone else from my instance already searched for the same community or wether I'm the first.
• Stream Aggregation. I signed up to loads of niche communities (which do get new posts), but never see any of those in my stream, no matter which mode I choose. I even started to unsubscribe from big communities to give smaller content a chance, to no avail. This effectively hides original and interesting content from view, and makes the overall experience more boring.
• Remote Instance Posts and Comments. When looking up a specific post or comment, I probably cannot do so while being logged in. Which means, I can read it, but cannot interact with it.
• Remote Instance Communities. When browsing the communities of another instance (for example, a themed instance like mander.xyz), I can only do so while being logged out. When I find an interesting community, I have to manually copy the link, search for it in another logged-in tab, find it again, to finally subscribe.
• Lack of Niche Content. It's getting better, but we still have a long way to go. This probably needs more general growth, but some technical aspects (like Stream Aggregation, Discovery and Remote Instance Browsing) also make it harder for niche communities to gain traction.
• GDPR Compliance. A private person and a public institution (which publishes educational content and videos) explicitly mentioned to me that they cannot join Lemmy since Lemmy cannot assure GDPR Compliance. I don't know wether that's true, just reporting the reason.

Overall, it still requires significant willingness to either accept missing features and content, or jump through technical hoops to regain some.

My experience on other fediverse platforms was similar, which most often resulted in me staying away from that particular service for now.

I also want less bot posts in my communities, but what's wrong about a bot that posts sports team scores to a sports community?

Just follow the example and make your own map :]

Ah, ClimeWorks. They also operate a plant in Iceland, which I used to offset a few minor car journeys. If I'd ever use a plane, I'd do the same.

That being said, the overall approach is very questionable. Even if the plants are run 100% by renewable energy, the question of opportunity costs remains. Is the whole grid already 100% renewable energy, or do we 'steal' low-carbon electricity from other appliances? Even if the whole grid was fully green, is DAC really the best use for the excess, or should we rather use it to produce green hydrogen, to prevent emissions elsewhere?

Direct Air Capture will be needed to stabilize our climate (or to reach neutrality by 2050 in the first place), which means we need to gain experience with it. But first and foremost we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground! Capture is economically and physically so expensive, it just isn't feasible to see it (regardless how, wether it's trees or fans) as an escape. It never will be. Keep fossil fuels it in the ground.

you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.

This is the feature in question:

Moving user profile to a new instance #1985: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985

What’s not okay: To expect others to submit to rules of your worldview. Especially if others do not share this view or agree to the rule.

You have the right to believe whatever you like, but don’t expect me to follow. Because I have the same right.

This applies to acts which do not harm anybody or anything, like destroying a copy of a book which you own, without eradicating the book from existence or taking it from others.

Otherwise, we play the victim game. I can do that too! Look, I’m an atheist. This is a very serious thing for me. I feel appalled by the idea that more than 200 years after the enlightenment (just to name one of many reasons), people still believe and share religious ideas. The abrahamic scriptures are riddled with hate speech and endorsements of violence. To call these text collections ‘holy’ is an insult to everything I hold dear, like science and human rights. I’m offended by their mere existence, and perceive public displays as a personal offense to my worldview. I demand everybody in every country to respect my feelings and stop these atrocious acts.

Of course the sane alternative would be to thicken my skin, learn to deal with my emotions (which means I deal with them, not externalizing), respect differences as long as they do no harm.

These book burnings only exist because people make an unjustified fuzz about it, occasionally in a violent way. You can have your religion with all it’s rules, but you cannot expect people to apply who don’t subscribe.

Without too much knowledge, I have the strong feeling this is equally true for the Fediverse and Lemmy.

And while it is fairly obvious and straight forward how to contribute as a programmer, it's less so for all the other, equally important, tasks.

The better of those articles and videos also emphasize you should test and measure, before and after you "improved" your code.

I'm afraid there is no standard, average solution. You trying to optimize your code might very well cause it to run slower.

So unless you have good reasons (good as in 'proof') to do otherwise, I'd recommend to aim for readable, maintainable code. Which is often not optimized code.

Yes, I also hope Lemmy becomes more user friendly. I think it is okay-ish by now. Some things are great, others are still a little terrible.

Mostly, I want to point at ongoing development and encourage anyone who can to support it. You can even post bounties on specific issues to encourage developers to work on that.

People in here seem to question why it's not the North, being responsible for the vast majority of emissions.

Rich countries have factories and cars, but also a technological standard and environmental regulations. Both limit the amount of air pollution (think dust particles) while greenhouse gases (like CO~2~) are something else.

Now think of a poor country with low regulations and old technology. People in slums burn literal dirt in their ovens. While they contribute almost nothing to climate change, air quality reflects the quality of fuels, ovens, engines and regulations. It's poor.

This is just a general take. I opened the article, but immediately closed it due to popups and eyesore.

Just a guess: to prevent bots from scraping the full content?

What are you going to do about it?

The very least people can do is talk about it and acknowledge it's bad.

Acceptance and normalization support the other side.

From the title, I had a question and found the answer in the FAQ:

What’s an unconference?

An unconference is a conference in which the participants – rather than the organizers – decide which sessions happen each day and on which topics. In the many years we have been organizing unconferences, we have found that for complex subjects like the Fediverse, attendees get more value (and fun!) out of unconferences than from traditional conferences. Sounds disorganized? It did to us, too, until we actually experienced our first one. So don’t worry, it will be fine :-)

Here are some suggestions for how to prepare for an unconference.

Ukraine can use whatever they like in Ukraine. If Russians don't like it, they can go back to Russia.