Ben Matthews

I don't buy this. I'm still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email's continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
Having said that, it's a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.

My boys have chromebooks, it’s almost mandatory for school now, and I get why teachers need the whole class to have a similar locally-networked tool. Problem is we as parents can't set anything, as we don't have 'developer' access, and the school controls their accounts. So at home, they do stupid stuff. The hardware is ok, I wish it was just linux. About what google gets - I doubt the current data is so valuable, they play a long game hoping to lock young people into their ecosystem, to profit from people with cash/energy in their 20s.

It's not passing such a milestone that's an issue, so much as how fast we pass it - i.e. a population decline is sustainable if gradual. My concern is that our models of economics and governance derive from previous centuries when population was rapidly growing, which helped provide social mobility and influence for younger generations. So we need to adjust economics and governance to compensate, to avoid stagnation and gerontocracy.

I'm here only a week or so, subscribed to about 100 communities that look interesting, but most have enough good posts yet very little discussion. Yet the top 'world news' and foss/fedi/prog topics get all the attention, it's not balanced. I hope the new 'scaled/best' ranking algorithm will help, if I understand correctly this is ready but not yet released? People should make more effort to find, upvote, comment on smaller communities (note- to find communities I recommend search-lemmy.com - you find more than from own instance).

Regarding Mastodon - as there are many more users there, it could be a gateway to Lemmy (that's how I got here). Now Mastodon 4.2 has better search, if you follow a lemmy community or account from mastodon, it may show up in such search. However Mastodon new search is opt-in for non-hashtag text, so I suppose Lemmy has to specify whether our posts / replies are searchable - anybody know how this works ?

From the tasks described, it seems to me they were not measuring 'Computer Skills' as reasoning, patience, tenacity - people could have similar issues with similar tasks involving a pile of papers.

I discovered Lemmy via links from Mastodon, and so found i prefer these threaded communities. Nevertheless individual "status" posts have a purpose too, we need both topic-focused and people-focused structures, these should overlap and connect better.
As my Mastodon account follows my Lemmy account, my posts/replies get into that system, more might be discovered if I included hashtags here. However I can't do the reverse - follow a Mastodon account, or reply to or boost a post, from Lemmy. Communities might grow more if we could enable such interaction.

That's great progress, thanks for all the work!
Glad to see enhanced federation with rest of fediverse - a small detail : the link for 'Automatically includes a hashtag with new posts' should point to pull #4533 (not #4398 ) - should help discoverability from mastodon, especially if community tags become customisable.

This principle works most but not all the time. I develop an interactive climate-system model that evolved with many small steps over 23 years. So it has many patchy fixes as climate policy structure changed, gases and sectors added etc. Then converted from java to scala module by module (out of ±50) , each step checking the plots looked as before. Result is it works, but parts are messy with legacy options and outdated code style. So sometimes it's necessary to radically rethink the structure, take big bold steps before it works again, that's hard. Scala strong type system, with hints from compiler (and "metals") help make such refactoring easier.

Well some small steps could include - taxes shifting from income to wealth, land and luxury use of resources, lowering barriers to voting for younger people (e.g. the requirement for stable residence disenfranchises people who move about), return to free education, a lower voting age and upper age-limit for politicians... Yet gerontocracy is a problem even in youth-skewed continents like Africa. So to be honest I don't know, maybe some people here on Lemmy have more revolutionary ideas...?

Some of us will even remember when compilers ran on big central computers, and you might have to wait 15–30 minutes to find out if your code was syntactically correct (let alone if it worked.)

My father remembers when he wrote code printed on a set of punched cards, they traveled several hours on an evening train to a warehouse with a big government statistics computer (that was too busy during daytime), the result came back by train next morning. Syntax error? try again tomorrow...

One reason people stick on Lemmy and other fediverse communities, is the choice of quality over quantity (in this case - wrt comments). So quality over quantity could also apply to platforms like Codeberg. Github has so many abandoned student projects or forks going nowhere - maybe making the effort to look beyond the obvious is an indicator of serious (new) projects and contributors ?

This is important, not least because making the cement and steel for these surplus apartments and associated road infrastructure makes an enormous contribution to global CO~2~ emissions. Look at how the emissions took off after 2005. So the sooner the bubble bursts, the better for the climate.

Note that Knesset has 120 seats (not obvious from the article). (also, of course, a large fraction of people between the river and the sea don't get to vote for any of its seats)

Yes, this seems inevitable, and given Europe's relative historical contribution to climate change, I think we have a moral obligation to welcome some, as (to some extent) their right, not charity. An issue, however, is that immigrants tend to gather in crowded hot cities near sea-level, just the places we should plan to slowly depopulate, while it's rarer to see African faces in sparsely populated upland rural areas, where there are more empty houses and older people needing services. Research about climate migration focused mainly on where people will move from, not enough about where it would make most sense for them to move to.

I develop an interactive climate / future scenario model, now in scala, earlier in java, almost no dependencies. No visualisation frameworks - the diverse plots hand coded in scala (transpiles using scala.js, makes SVGs on demand). The science code from demography through economy emissions, bioegeochemistry, to climate - just scala, no interface to other languages / models, no "solver" tool. Data input just text files -easy to check. Some modules over 20 years old (except converted java -> scala), still work reliably. It's efficient as all client-side, no IO/net between adjustments and results. Seems no big institute would employ me for such model dev because my experience doesn't tick the boxes of all the current fashionable frameworks. But at least I can share a way to explore the future for ourselves ... and yes it’s bleak but not so dire as many people here seem to assume, we still have choices.

It's only 5th December, seems unusually early for -58º. From Wikipedia - Yakutsk, maybe daily min should be about -37º now. I recall crossing Siberia by train in early December, rain in west, fresh snow in east, lakes still water, yet coming back in April you could still walk on Baikal. Seems odd, but they get extra problem of fires in winter, as fire hoses freeze, can't extinguish them. Anyway polar vortex went wobbly recently, so we get alternating cold and warm waves - always look for both sides of regional anomalies.

Pretty images from far away (for most of us) ... but don't forget Laki volcano on Iceland led to two years without a summer harvest, and hence to the french revolution - these eruptions can have a big influence on history (future)...

What are we waiting for ?

I guess - coordination among the western governments - as if only some participate, those that don't might gain from future investments from bullying autocracies. Also, there may be reciprocal losses whose impacts would be unbalanced.
But it seems to me the risks of setting such precedent are far outweighed by the risk of increasing irrelevance for our democratic values in a world of increasing autocracy, if we let p***n and team get away without paying for such destruction.
Maybe there is some way to do this incrementally, to provide more motivation to depose the tsar, stop, and quit, sooner rather than later?

Too true.
I still remember when java5 came out, many new features, great potential for a massive refactoring of my interactive climate model. Within that, I had an idea called "parallel worlds" for comparing scenarios, whereby for efficiency data was shared for parts of the system, and split across parts that varied as user adjusted parameters. So I pulled apart the whole codebase, and joined it back together again... - about two years later, by which time colleagues had given up interest.
[ story simplified to relate to point of OP - not only task in two years! ].
Now I develop a derivative climate system model in scala, but evidently it's more interesting to develop some new complex part of the science code, than fix a graphical interface for beginners. But moods vary - some days lacking energy for refactoring, could be satisfied ticking off a few small tasks in a todo list. Yet after some time, brain craving for another big new complex idea...

Hmm, publishing that will really help those Crimean beach hotels get customers for this summer...

Could add a small personal observation from three who came to our village: The oldest - retired - saves money (that she receives from govt here) to invest in a new appartment in the corner of ukraine as far as possible from russia (although she was a russian speaker, from the opposite corner). The middle one stayed here for a complete school year for her kids, then returned to join her husband and help reconstruct their region, left broken as the invaders retreated. The youngest works in tech sector and brought a baby and a man with another nationality (so, free to leave), they seemed more optimistic about the opportunities from this situation - maybe will stay west.

Many comments below (->above?) about housing. But it seems to me, the problem in much of Europe is that many old people hang on to large half-empty family houses, so over 65s are occupying a lot more space than under 15s (although the latter have more energy, need space to play ...). It's a pity they blame immigrants for this.

Because at least you are thinking about such problems (unlike too many). I thought similarly back in 1998, many records broken since, we're still here, now glad my children are too and getting educated, to help society get through this. By the way the original post is from Ireland which may not get so much warmer (depends thermohaline circulation...) - maybe stormier, although much (not all) of europe will still be nice to live in 2050, adaptation may include many people relocating.

Good article, big problem, but I doubt email lists are a solution. I have over years subscribed to many email lists, they get filtered to mailboxes by topic, which I'm afraid to open because overwhelmed by messages. I prefer to find specific news items recommended by communities as here on Lemmy. As for AI dominating SEO for google, it seems there could be an opening for a new search engine that guarantees only content from original-sources, neither AI nor content-farms.

Being good at passing exams ("majoring") is just the first stage, continuing in the topic as a career depends more on networking skills.

I'm using Alexandrite, find it good

The key question is how many of the younger women will return home - they, and their children, are key to demographic future of Ukraine, but they can also more easily find jobs in the west. The older women are more likely to miss their roots and depend on host country financial support, so are more likely to return.

the Lemmy devs tell you to use Kbin or Mastodon or anything else

So to reply to Nutomic's closing remark on github:

I dont see why Lemmy should also implement that.

Because - if I could post to Mdon or reply to a Mdon post from my Lemmy account, some Mdon users (more numerous) might think - hey that's interesting, I'll follow that guy, then see my other posts to Lemmy, click and open up the whole thread (yes that works), and so eventually come to contribute to Lemmy too.

Nearly 200 upthumbs, more ?!
But the discussion explores broader and narrow variants, need to coalesce.

I don't find that - using Mastodon (4.2) I can see threaded discussion in Lemmy - each comment as a post - but have to start somewhere.

Wonder whether the popularity of the president will follow a similar pattern as in France, trying similar idea ... ?

There is no climate panacea, only baskets of solutions. Bamboo has remarkable properties from an engineering pov - strong light hollow tubes, and so could be used more to substitute for plastics and metals, in relatively short-lived products (which most are). You are right that it's not so durable as wood from trees, and it’s more suited to wet climates. I have several kinds in my garden, green in winter, grape vines dangle along it in summer, a shallow root barrier (old tiles) contain it.

I see that says 'has to be local only, not federated' (same issue also discussed on github).
'Local only' suggests to me front-end, i.e. info stored by browser. In that case people who are often switching devices would have to re-organise on each one, which could be tedious.
So isn't there something in between local and federated - i.e. saved by the instance as user-settings, but not pushed to other instances?
Maybe there could be some manual copying mechanism, so a user who organises a big set of communities could share with others. (This reminds me of mastodon 'lists' and various ways of organising and transferring them).

Humans and our cultural diversity are part of biodiversity which makes life beautiful, it's about balance. A longterm goal should be to save more space for other species, but we need educated young people to keep knowledge and tackle the legacy of the mess (among much else) left by their ancestors.

I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that "coupling" in such models of complex systems is a 'good' thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc.. (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
If restarting in scala3 I'd structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I'd known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn't anticipate such complexity.

Maybe so. But can anybody tell us, what fraction of this big sum is private wealth, rather than government assets ? If it includes items like mansions in london and french riviera the value could be much less in a fire-sale - only so many sheikhs to take over, and they might get worried too. So the "local rich" might hope to pick up bargains.

Vivaldi recently posted this -vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you.
See also vivaldi community

I began programming java climate model with UK keyboard. When I moved to the continent, switched to swiss then belgian keyboard to better type emails/docs in french, but it was so tedious for code brackets {[()]} and some other punctuation, eventually switched back. Recently converted whole codebase to Scala 3 (here's the model), now can drop most of those brackets. I speculate whether one motivation for creating scala3 (made in in Lausanne) was swiss/french keyboards.

The problem is that whatever careful process EU implements to restrict spread of fake news etc., authoritarian states will copy its facade and terminology, to justify their own censorship of real news ( in Russia people go to prison for calling a war a war).

Although not an expert on that specific country, I can be sure that ' almost all ' is very misleading, even if it gets a lot upvotes because people find it convenient to blame some big bad other. Even if you have specific data for electricity, don't forget a lot of CO2 is emitted by cars, and also by fuel to heat homes (including some peat in special case of ireland - and in that country a large fraction of GHG emissions is also methane from agriculture).