roastpotatothief

@roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml
30 Post – 33 Comments
Joined 3 years ago

It is useful to have lots of stupid laws. It makes people feel powerless and frustrated. It means the police can always find excuses to persecute you.

The technicalities of the individual laws are not important. It's the psychological effect of the whole body of laws on a people.

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polar bears. it's the only animal that likes to eat people. daily life is just too safe and dull.

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The "slur filter" was causing so much arguing that the devs stopped hard coding it. Now the whoever is running the instance can choose any or no filter.

Just use schwalbe marathon. They are puncture proof and last forever. I once got home and picked a shard of glass as king as my fingernail out of one.

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This is a great project. I had the same idea myself, and posted about it, but never did anything about it! It's great that people like you are here, with the creativity, and the motivation and skills to do this work.

I think this project is as necessary as Wikipedia itself.

The criticisms in these comments are mostly identical to the opinion most people had about Wikipedia when it started - the it would become a cesspool of nonsense and misinformation. That it was useless and worthless when encyclopaedias already exist.

Wikipedia was the first step in broadening what a source if authoritative information can be. It in fact created richer and more truthful information than was possible before, and enlightened the world. Ibis is a necessary second step on the same path.

It will be most valuable for articles like Tieneman square, or the Gilets Jaunes, where there are sharply different perspectives on the same matter, and there will never be agreement. A single monolithic Wikipedia cannot speak about them. Today, wiki gives one perspective and calls it the truth. This was fine in the 20th century when most people believed in simple truths. They were told what to think by single sources. They never left their filter bubbles. This is not sustainable anymore.

To succeed and change the world, this project must do a few things right.

  1. The default instance should just be a mirror of Wikipedia. This is the default source of information on everything, so it would be crazy to omit it. Omitting it means putting yourself in competition with it, and you will lose. By encompassing it, the information in Ibis is from day 1 greater then wiki. Then Ibis will just supersede wiki.

  2. There should be a sidebar with links to the sane article on other instances. So someone reading about trickle down economics on right wing instance, he can instantly switch to the same article on a left wing wiki and read the other side of it. That's the feature that will make it worthwhile for people.

  3. It should look like Wikipedia. For familiarity. This will help people transition.

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people have lots of different reasons. some don't like the idea of killing a big animal with feelings and expressiveness. some because of how farms abuse or torture animals in some countries. some think Anibal farming is worse for the environment. some have religious prohibitions. some think it's bad for your health. some people don't like the taste or can't afford it but don't want people to think they are weird so they tell people they have a principled argument for it.

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Proof of work isn't a necessary part of it. You need to answer the question "how does money get created". Proof of work is a very robust way to create and allocate new money. Fiat currencies just answer " i nominate one entity who is allowed to create as much money as he likes”. Other answers are possible.

It's also possible to use a proof of work algorithm which doesn't consume much energy. The usual proposal is for a "proof of doing work and allocating RAM and storing something on disk". Bitcoin just chose the most robust and simplest algorithm, which does consume a lot of energy.

In a future currency, the proof of work algorithm could allocate money to people who sequester carbon or plant trees. The thing about inventing a new type of money is that you can do anything. Bitcoin is a great leap of progress for humanity, but has a couple of flaws. Those flawed features can be reinvented, while still keeping all the benefits.

die hard

For a start, bitcoin is revolutionary. It solves all the problems with the banking system.

For example, people's card details get stolen all the time. Bitcoin had solved this by using a new public key for each transaction.

When something is purchased using a credit/debit card, you are effectively using the same public key for every transaction. So what is happening is replay attacks. This type of scam is inevitable because the banking system is insecure by nature. It's built on a foundation of insecurity.

Bitcoin fixes all that. Bitcoin or similar is necessary for money-based economies to continue to work in the future.

Bitcoin and crypto are more than this. This is just one of the important innovations bitcoin makes.

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The lemmy devs and users are rigidly against hate speech / free speech. they are afraid it will push away many users who are more sensitive, and ruin the quality of discussion. they don't tolerate free speech instances.

but who knows, they might be right.

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Yes block chains predate bitcoin and are very useful. Git uses them. A currency is a perfect use case for a block chain. You need to robustly store balances and transactions so they can't be tampered with.

I would say it's insane to have a currency which is not block chain based. Too easy to fiddle your finances.

In general we are open for constructive feedback

My one big fear right now is that a mod could delete my words, and they would be lost forever.

Sometimes I write long essays here. They are ideas that I think are important and original. I write them so people will be able to read them many years into the future.

It's important that anything deleted by a mod or an admin can be saved by the creator afterwards.

I'd argue it's necessary that nothing can ever be fully deleted, if you want people to ever write anything important here.

That's why historically most of the most important world-change essays were written to newspapers. Once a newspaper is published, it is available forever. It can never be expunged.

  1. I just assumed that would be easy, that you would have one instance with no actual content. It just fetches the wikipedia article with the same name, directly from the wikipedia website. I guess I didn't really think about it.

  2. I guess that's a design choice. Looking at different ways similar issues have been solved already...

How does wikipedia decide that the same article is available in different languages? I guess there is a database of links which has to be maintained.

Alternatively, it could assume that articles are the same if they have the same name, like in your example where "Mountain" can have an article on a poetry instance and on a geography instance, but the software treats them as the same article.

Wikipedia can understand that "Rep of Ireland" = "Republic of Ireland". So I guess there is a look-up-table saying that these two names refer to the same thing.

Then, wikipedia can also understand cases where articles can have the same name but be unrelated. Like RIC (paramilitary group) is not the same as RIC (feature of a democracy).

I do think, if each Ibis instance is isolated, it won't be much different from having many separate wiki websites. When the software automatically links you to the same information on different instances, that's when the idea becomes really interesting and valuable.

Great song that I'd nearly forgotten about.

I'm always the first to start these threads.

But it's good to remember, we chose Lemmy over sites like notabug because it works better. Some good decisions by the devs created a good website, enabling good discussions, which you just don't see elsewhere.

Some things like the "slur filter" seem sketchy, but you have to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. They clearly know a couple of things about forum design.

At the same time, it's important to talk about this stuff. Better ideas usually come from debate.

Very interesting. It shows that Lemmy was always a political project. It was always meant to advocate certain politics and discourage others.

IMO this is not what new users expect. So we keep seeing these posts of people realising, and being shocked, and sometimes rage-quitting.

Only a certain portion of people will stay with Lemmy after that realisation, and the others will flee. Is that what you want? (again just IMO)

If not, is there a way to make this political vision more evident, to try to stop this effect?


TBH I'm against the politics of Lemmy. But (IMO again) despite that it's still a valuable project, and maybe a historically important one.

Ideological freedom encourages nasty people. And restrictions encourage thoughtless people.

You can go on notabug and ignore the crazy psychos and chat with the creative people.

You can go on reddit and find endless people with no independent thought, repeating things and not listening to reach other.

Lemmy is in the middle. But IMO that's not an objective good thing, it's a preference.

or at a stretch or could be an argument against beef. but the question was about meat generally.

yes lots of people cant understand that others can have other ideas about the world. in fact the historical norm for humans is for everyone in the same community to believe the same thing. this time of ideological diversity we live in is anomylous.

of someone says “i believe the earth is flat” most people will not accept that immediately. it's triggering.

people are triggered by alien ideas. it’s not bad. it’s just being human.

greenhouse gases and water usage are different issues i didn't address here.

the usa is one of the "few parts of the world" i was talking about, that it is a bad example of sustainable farming.

This is exactly what happens. The highest quality land in a country is used for tillage. The less productive parts are used for grazing. This is how farmers make the most money. They'd be fools to use productive land for grazing and grow crops on poor land.

This seems like the right approach. You can get different answers depending on which measure you use

You could compare

1.Willful killings in total

  1. willful killings per year

  2. willful killings during the 1920s-40s

  3. willful killings during Churchill's regime versus Hitler's regime.

I guess the UK will have higher numbers by every measure except 1. The figures should be easy to find.

The argument is mostly valid. But the real point is that capital gains tax needs to change. That would solve the stated problem, without reducing home ownership.

As a result, a majority of the population is literally invested in seeing the value of homes always go up.

This is actually not true. In general, ome owners do not benefit from global house price increases.

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How do you mean "a powerful tool"? Tool for what?

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Any update on this?

I couldn't find any comment from the devs. Was there one?


There is an extra problem, not mentioned here. When there are subs with the same name, it is actually impossible to know of choose which sub I am posting to. Like here.

Oh like a security for further borrowing? Could be.

You make a lot of points. To explain all of those things, I would news to make a very long post. i think i will do that when i get time.

That's the defence of the "slur filter" that everyone can agree on. It's harmless because it does almost nothing. It has no real benefit or cost.

The people who say it deters fascists - it just doesn't hold water.#

You have obnoxious people on all sides of the debate, including people who avoid listening to foreign ideas by labeling the other sides.

To be honest, nobody knows how the culture would be different under a different sweet of rules, especially the people who act most confident about it.

It is all teddits.

depends on the land. normally livestock are put on land which won't grow anything else.

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what kind of erosion?

are you thinking of "overgrazing"?

that's true in a few parts of the world. it may not be valid at all, depending where op is from. in general livestock is the most sustainable land use food.

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