Is it?

Researchers discovered the skeleton of a young Neanderthal man who was about six years old when he died. Although researchers were not sure what the child’s gender was, she was named Tina.

I can only really guess whether they're talking about one or two subjects here. In one sentence they call a six year old a man and gender them male, then in the next they gender them female and call them Tina. The pronouns keep switching back and forth.

Scientists noted that Tina’s survival to the age of six indicates that her team provided the necessary care for the child and her mother throughout this period.

Her team? Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?

That all reads like bad AI writing to me.

I went meatless for a year and discovered that a lack of animal protein seems to exacerbate my PTSD symptoms. It did make me a lot more creative with veggies, though.

I definitely think there's something to be said for the average meal contributing to the torture and slaughter of less than one animal per year versus contributing to hundreds.

What a horrible equation to have to consider. We really are, as a species, pretty monstrous. We normalize all the horrible shit people do to other living beings, to the environment, and to one another, but it's seriously worrying behavior. If you don't grant us the charity of looking from within a framework of the primacy of human needs, we really kinda make our fantasy monsters seem pretty laid back and non-violent by comparison.

I spent way more time than was warranted digging into this completely petty drama.

Eris seems to have been widely blocked and defederated for using the word 'based' and for thinking ubuntu.buzz was about linux. I'm not sure what kind of perspective makes that a priority, but it certainly doesn't seem to be one based in compassion or world experience. Half the people I've met who use the word 'based' have nothing to do with 4chan, they're just young. The first time I heard it was in reference to Mark Bunker during the Scientology protests in 08. Which, while certainly connected to 4chan, I don't think can really be cast in the same light as all the Gamergate crap and everything that came after.

Defederation is an important feature, and people should be able to defederate from whoever they want. What isn't okay, though, is people going out of their way to propagate pettiness as much as humanly possible. Eris seems a little rough around the edges, but I also get the impression that the folks interacting with her in all the overly dramatic nonsense I just read are not acting in remotely good faith. They resemble a twitter mob looking for somebody to hate on, taking zero interest in understanding or nuance. No thanks.

I think that if we defederated, Lemmy would be much worse off for it. I think we'd also be a lot slower, and I'd be checking it a lot less.

Beehaw brings something to Lemmy that Lemmy really needs. It's leftist, but it's also very compassion-focused, and we kind of lack that elsewhere. The rest of the otherwise kind of similar communities largely lack the spirit of getting along in good faith that I see here.

Like, what other community do you ever see people responding to hostility by reminding people where they are and it actually mattering? People seem to largely respect the space. Not to say it doesn't ever have a need for moderation, it clearly does and y'all do a great job, but with that moderation it manages to be an exemplary space.

It would be a shame for Lemmy to lose that positive influence and that good example. And it would leave the more lefty-leaning options kind of.. meh.

But it also really helps to bulk out the experience of using Beehaw. We don't get that many posts, so it's nice to be able to go to subscribed or all instead of just local. It'd definitely be a bummer to lose that.

Anyway, I think you're much closer to your goal than you might see while you're on the moderating and administrating end. You see all the nasty stuff up close, but we get to see the result. And compared to the rest of the internet, it's an oasis.

The laws of quantum mechanics are confusing, predicting that particles are also waves and that cats are simultaneously alive and dead.

Okay, so, like, that's punchier writing than the actual truth, but how am I supposed to buy anything else about physics in the article after that? The level of oversimplification of relatively commonly known concepts does not give me confidence that the rest won't be pop sci drivel.

Corporate metrics are so fucking divorced from the creation of any actual value that it's baffling that it's legal. It's an economic wildfire and everybody just stands around throwing fuel on it in the name of 'growth'.

You know what cares about nothing but growth? Cancer.

I think when people think of the danger of AI, they think of something like Skynet or the Matrix. It either hijacks technology or builds it itself and destroys everything.

But what seems much more likely, given what we've seen already, is corporations pushing AI that they know isn't really capable of what they say it is and everyone going along with it because of money and technological ignorance.

You can already see the warning signs. Cars that run pedestrians over, search engines that tell people to eat glue, customer support AI that have no idea what they're talking about, endless fake reviews and articles. It's already hurt people, but so far only on a small scale.

But the profitablity of pushing AI early, especially if you're just pumping and dumping a company for quarterly profits, is massive. The more that gets normalized, the greater the chance one of them gets put in charge of something important, or becomes a barrier to something important.

That's what's scary about it. It isn't AI itself, it's AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

Anybody else feel like Lemmy is like 60% Russian trolls lately?

That's goofy.

It's like someone hearing someone complaining about a slum lord and pointing them to a company that gives out free parcels of land with free trailers on them. It's not usually, like, a mansion, but it'll do.

We should kick Texas out of the US.

I keep hearing all these stories about people who were in dire health circumstances asking permission to leave work. Why are they asking? Stop asking your employer if you can go home when you're in danger. Tell them and don't accept no for an answer.

Until workers start standing up for themselves and telling, not asking, nothing's going to change.

It literally isn't. Some states are pretty shit, but the US isn't forcing people into exile for building libraries. And some states are great places where people have rights and the legislature is actually willing to protect its population from authoritarian policies.

Considering that their literal stated purpose is to create a curated list of 'nice, well-run servers', I don't see how delisting someone is remotely outside of their wheelhouse. If a server is federated with meta, it's not well-run. Easy peasy.

Nobody needs to be listed on Fedi Garden or has a right to be listed on Fedi Garden. They can still federate or defederate as they wish, just as Fedi Garden can choose to list them or not as they wish. Everybody gets to do what they want, as is the point.

The measures they use to say the economy is 'good' have one thing in common: they fail to account for value whatsoever.

They account for value in dollars, that's true. But they fail to account for value in any sense that matters: the usefulness of a product or service on the one hand and the labor that produces it on the other. Instead, we look at wages, employment rates, profits, and prices. Those are admittedly easy to quantify and play around with, but they aren't really anchored to anything meaningful.

For example, let's say your company makes on-the-go smoothies, sold in grocery stores and convenience stores. You've got a quality product: a relatively thick smoothy with quality ingredients and a good variety of purees and juices. You product isn't cheap, but that's because you use quality ingredients, pay your employees a fair wage, and use reasonable labor practices in your bottling plant. As a result, people love your product and enjoy working for your company. Soon you come to take up a prominent position on shelves, because your regular customers will reliably buy up your stock.

Now let's say you do an IPO. Once the board members have sway, they want to iron out some of these 'inefficiencies' in your company to increase their profits. First, they come for the ingredients. You wind up with fewer purees in smaller proportions, a greater proportion of inexpensive juices, and the most expensive ingredients dropping off the list entirely. Your loyal customers are annoyed that their smoothies aren't as thick, but it's still better than the other options, so they keep coming.

At your bottling plant, wages start to stagnate. Benefits aren't eliminated, but a new management technique is introduced in which hours are spread out to make it difficult to meet the minimum to qualify. Shifts begin increasingly running on skeleton crews as hours are spread thinner. Of course, the same amount of work still needs to be done, so the employees are doing two to three times as much work as they used to.

Long-term employees who once made the company what it was start to see the change and look for other options before things get worse, leading to a fresh generation of new employees with no clue how much better the company used to be.

At the end your profits are up, employment is up, and you're selling just as much or nearly as much of your product as you were before. If you only look at the numbers, it seems like this whole endeavor was a fantastic win for your company.

Except you've just made the world a little worse. The market presence you earned with your high-quality product no longer has an equivalent product taking it up, degrading the real value of the market itself. Employees are running themselves ragged making a perhaps flat or slightly rising wage per hour, but a wage that's actively diminishing in terms of the labor required to earn it and the purchasing power it comes with.

Now what happens when you take this model and project it to the entire economy?

All the numbers say record profits, low unemployment, stocked shelves full of high-demand products. And yet the reality is that we have to work more to pay for less of shittier and shittier products. Even the people who win don't really win, because they make a worse world for themselves where they can't get a good smoothy.

The whole thing is a mirage that we've been killing our society chasing.

You know who the least trusted party is here? Not privacy-focused users, not even malicious users and bots. You are the least trusted party here. The greatest point of security vulnerability is giving greater control of what does and doesn't get seen to a company that's proven itself to be a bad actor.

Megacorps that feed on our data are the danger. Not just to network security, but to humanity. We don't want or need you limiting our access to information and to one another so that you can further lock down your pilfering of our personal data and your force-feeding of ads and toxic cultural forces.

The abuse of this responsibility has already caused untold damage to our individual lives, the functioning of our societies, and our actual planet itself. It's led to the mass promotion of some of the worst ideas in human history, and the diminishment of good will, social cohesion, and personal autonomy. The last thing we need is more overreach.

Leave the internet alone. Go make a game or something.

Less incentive to waste time, more ability to focus on work, and a population suddenly increasing their potential time as consumers by 50%? The capitalists should be drooling over it as much as the socialists. It's like increasing the population of some markets by half for free without any additional housing costs.

And it helps with unemployment and makes more of the population productive.

Kotaku out here dutifully defending the status quo. Maybe these complex, top-heavy, primarily commercially motivated hierarchies aren't a good environment for the development of decent games. If those top people have a vision and a passion for their art, it'll show. If they don't and all they care about is money while throwing figurative scraps of creative freedom and control to their actual development and art teams, that'll show too.

What Larian did right, more than anything else, is retain artistic integrity. They didn't hold back to stuff anything behind a paywall or try to figure out how to design their game to appeal to whales. They had something they wanted to make, a franchise they wanted to do proper justice, and they knocked the ball out of the park.

Not because it's perfect, because it isn't, but because it is incredibly clear that they didn't sell out their artistic integrity. It couldn't have been made if they had.

That, I think, is what some development studios are worried about. Ultimately though, that's a good thing. It offers the potential of changing the nature of the business to one that's less about Skinner boxes and more about creating an enjoyable and maybe even profound experience.

Please do use Baldur's Gate 3 as a weapon to cut money grubbing corporate filth out of the industry.

Capitalism is primarily defined by the need to push for constant growth. There's nothing wrong with buying and selling things, but making growth a matter of primacy automatically means the quality of the product and user experience isn't. Neither is the well-being and livelihood of the workers.

In a system where companies are incentivized to compete on that level, we can't have nice things. Not for long anyway.

It's definitely capitalism, rather than just commerce, that's the problem. It's a social cancer.

Only. Cool ad. 🙄

They literally did.

God fucking damn it. I finally find something to replace Google docs, get all my fucking work into it, and they shut it down. I will never have anything to do with any of these flakes again.

Anyone recommend a replacement?

Whether or not you want someone to use your likeness isn't necessarily just a matter of money. You can't just wave dollar bills at any objection and assume everything's going to be okay. Some things are more important than a few bucks.

Paywalled, but the little bit before that is tiring. Gotta put that bolded 'Israel has a right to defend itself' lip-service to genocide before anything else can be said, huh? Tell me again how the perpetrator of apartheid is defending itself against members of the population it's pushed into an overcrowded open-air prison by bombing them into oblivion.

I wanna go live in the woods.

There sure has been a lot of propaganda being posted to Beehaw lately.

Even just modding I've noticed a lot of extremely confident opinion-giving that's equally uninformed. I think people just like to feel like they have some special insight, so they tend to run with whatever the first narrative they hear is and stick hard to it. It reminds me of all those little bullshit factoids people love to repeat, like that daddy long legs are the most venomous spider but are incapable of biting people.

The big obvious example in DayZ is the myth of the 'alpha wolf'. People have for ages been claiming that one of the two wolf textures (usually the white one, but I've heard both) is an 'alpha' wolf that's stronger than the others and will cause the pack to run away if you kill it. This is a complete myth with no basis in the code of the game. One wolf type is a child class of the other and the only difference is their texture.

And yet some people will get extremely offended if you mention this. Even if they literally have never even peeked under the hood of DayZ and are well aware that you've been actively developing mods for it.

Welp, I guess we're going to be getting a DRM-breaking emulator accompanied by some weird new rant by Empress.

Here's the actual article this one is a lazy rewrite of.

https://www.science.org/content/article/cats-have-nearly-300-facial-expressions

What a weasely, deceptively meandering little article.

First it spends its time talking about actual overt displays of racism and anti-semitism, but writes it in a way that makes it easy to confuse what they're referring to with the song itself, as if Anthony is somehow responsible for the actions of Trump or conservative country singers. This is pretty transparent and pathetic.

When it actually talks about the song, it points out its fatphobic, anti-welfare lyric as its only evidence of racism and anti-semitism. While I certainly agree that this line is ignorant (and indicative of a backward political sensibility), there's no mention of race. There's certainly a strong correlation between anti-welfare sentiments and racism, but the one doesn't really qualify as a strong demonstration of the other. The article, however, seems to think this is plenty, and drives right on forward as if they had their proof.

What really raises an eyebrow about this article, though, is its sudden pivot to what seems to be overt Russian propaganda. They typify the war in Ukraine as 'US led and provoked' and Ukraine itself as a 'fascist-infested regime'. This while mocking US humanitarian efforts and #MeToo, as well, seemingly, as leftist 'racial and gender politics'. It even takes the time to hate on unions.

This article claims to be from a socialist source, and yet all of its positions outside of its opposition to what it describes as racism and anti-semitism, are anti-leftist. Curious.

Sounds like WSWS is a potential candidate for a Kremlin mouthpiece.

This article is talking about Democratic wins in actual elections.

Okay well maybe I'll circle back to it, then. Maybe bad science writing has made me a little cynical.

It's literally a list of well-run servers. Do you not see how you're attempting to 'take away choice' from the proprietors of the list by telling them who they must list and what criteria they must use for their website?

You're perfectly capable of doing what they've done. Go spend the time to curate a list, put up a simple little site, and make your own decisions. Nobody's stopping you. That's the point of federation and independence. You get to do what you want if you have the follow-through.

Admins likewise can do whatever they like. They can choose to federate with threads or to not.

Personally, I think it's a little shady to run around shaming people who put their time and effort into projects and insist that they must lick Meta's boots. Little bit suspect.

Do you see Trump meaningfully curbing emissions? Because I see him disbanding every possible effort to lower emissions and lighting shit on fire just for fun.

I think it's a mistake to too firmly attach aggression to one specific behavioral origin, which I believe is what the study is getting at to begin with. There are certainly forms of aggression that are rooted in defensive behaviors that aren't well thought out, as well as deliberate and methodical forms of aggression. It's certainly a misapprehension to assume that all aggression is a result of being unable to control oneself, which does have some implications for how we should be dealing with it.

If, for example, we look at every abuser through the assumption that they simply can't control themselves rather than that they've got a maladaptive way of viewing the world and interacting with others that leads them to use aggression in order to exercise control, we're likely going to take the wrong steps to try to change that situation.

Yeah, into shit.

Wasn't there somebody just the other day talking about Adobe's ever-growing bloated bullshit versus GIMP's sleek UI and consistent features? Oh. Right. It was me.

Honestly, I think defederating from some of the major instances is a big part of the reason it's as nice here as it is. Beehaw doesn't need to be a giant to have a place and a purpose, and it doesn't need to be the only Lemmy instance anyone uses either.

I think we all need to get past this nonsensical idea that everything has to be the biggest to be worthwhile. Nobody goes to a nice local restaurant and wishes they were at McDonald's. It's okay to just make something good and let it be. It doesn't have to explode to monumental proportions, and when it does that's not really that great a thing.

Federation is an amazing tool in large part because of defederation. If instances aren't using both they might as well all be screaming down the same meaningless content firehose, as far as I can tell.

Why are we posting articles that treat Jordan Peterson like a legitimate academic and not a discredited hate monger?

The title here is a little misleading. A signal that repeated once per hour, as in 60 minutes, would be pretty astounding, and might be a good way for a civilization with enough information about us to say 'hi' in a way we'd recognize. It would certainly be very strange to see a natural phenomenon ticking away the hours at a precise rate.

53.8 minutes, on the other hand, is a bit less attention grabbing.

It's a literal suicide booth.

Sure, you can go on all day about changing out broom handles and whatever other metaphor you like, but I don't need my body to be a point of interaction with any consciousness and the world, i need it to be a point of interaction between my consciousness and the world.

I have a lot of feelings about the emptiness of identity and the ultimate unity of the universe, but that doesn't mean I'm going to off myself for the sake of convenience.

If I make a copy of myself, I'm still myself. I don't become the copy. I have no reason to believe that a genetically identical clone that's somehow got a copy of my memories will spontaneously cause my consciousness to jump to the other clone. No evidence of any such thing happening.

If I, then, make a copy of myself on Mars, why would I expect to spontaneously inhabit it?

The only reason being ripped apart and having an identical copy made looks like teleportation is the timing. There's a short story about this, where a teleporter malfunction leaves the original version of the traveler alive. Protocol is to 'balance the equation' by incinerating the survivor, which as it turned out was the fate of anyone who stepped into the teleporter under normal circumstances.

Think about a file in a computer system. Copying the file and making changes doesn't change the original file. When you download something and alter it, that's a different copy of the file that's been changed, not the original. Even when you move something rather than copy it, what's actually happening is it's being copied and then the original is destroyed.

Seamless for everyone else, sure. But a tragic, needless, and utterly stupid death for the one who enters the machine.

I wonder if it'll get to a point where some of the world leaders still backing Israel financially and with munitions actually have to do something. Like, is there any amount of cruelty and atrocity at this point that they won't fund? Does it literally have to get all the way to concentration camps? Overt industrialized systematic genocide? Where's their line?

Also like, when the transphobes came out to play under the guise of feminism, I feel like the UK leaned into it a bit. Now they're seeing that hate and marginalization can't really be compartmentalized in the long run.

It's the same thing that's playing out economically in the US and probably in much of the rest of the world. Tolerating somebody getting crowded out eventually means taking your turn unless you're always at the epicenter, which you probably won't be.

I've met a lot of people who were rich 20 years ago and are barely scraping by now because they thought they'd always be on top and spent that time entrenching the system. Surprise surprise, the system doesn't care about you.

TERF island out here in shock that the wave of bigotry isn't stopping with trans women.