This is one of those things that sounds meaningful, but can be said about literally any problem in any system. Not all knowledge requires the same level of precision for confidence.

If the engineers at NASA who are familiar with the system say this is a known error state that will be fixed the next time the system designed to correct it fires on its set schedule, there's not a whole lot added by saying sure, but what if they're wrong?

It's just restating the table stakes of existence.

It's nice to see an older author on a more traditional platform have such a clear and informed opinion on something deeply steeped in internet culture.

I recognize this is agism on my part, but I was surprised when I saw his picture.

This unfortunately is a new dog whistle for trans individuals :(

See here: https://www.politico.com/video/2023/04/11/florida-republican-calls-transgender-people-mutants-881289

No system of government can withstand 50% of its participants being bad actors.

I honestly don't know how we get out of this situation without aggressively litigating politicians that have committed crimes. That requires overwhelming political will, though, and it's obvious now how important Fox News and Right Wing radio has been to creating an atmosphere where that will doesn't exist.

The trans kind :(

https://www.politico.com/video/2023/04/11/florida-republican-calls-transgender-people-mutants-881289

Absolutely disgusting language.

Theory in science generally means something much more stringent than it does in vernacular. From Wikipedia:

A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or a fortiori, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. Where possible, theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment.[1][2] In circumstances not amenable to experimental testing, theories are evaluated through principles of abductive reasoning. Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.

A scientific theory differs from a scientific fact or scientific law in that a theory explains "why" or "how": a fact is a simple, basic observation, whereas a law is a statement (often a mathematical equation) about a relationship between facts and/or other laws.

So when something is being put forward as "A Scientific Theory" it is meant to be taken as the best possible explanation we can make of why the universe is the way it is, backed by exhaustive tests using the best methods currently available to us.

In science, when something is just a theory in the way you mean, it's called a hypothesis.

I'm not sure it would be legal if they were forced to reveal medical information.

The thing that should scare advertisers the most isn't just the slight dip in revenue, but that those users are moving to ad-free sites. Those impressions are unrecoverable by redistributing spend away from Reddit.

Lol. The knee-jerk contrarianism online really gets under my skin, especially when it's towards experts.

Like yeah, sometimes experts are wrong or systems don't behave as expected. But framing that as some sort of erudite insight really bugs me.

"I hope the recovery system works!" doesn't need to be rewritten as "Mmm yes. But what these engineers haven't considered is the possibility that they are wrong".

Have unsecured messages be opt-in and have a warning banner on non-encrypted messages. Maybe even a confirmation dialog.

That way people who want or need to be that paranoid can be, but the rest of us can have something a bit more convenient.

By disallowing SMS messaging they've just made it so a lot of people who were being secure when their contacts allowed, aren't being secure at all.

Crowd extensions are already pretty common with traditional VFX techniques.

I worked in Hollywood editorial for a bit and, IMO, the producers are playing up the AI stuff so that said stuff can be given to the writers and actors as a "victory" instead of the real spectres in the room:

• streaming residuals need to get the same payout and transparency as home video and syndication did

• streaming numbers need to be made available to creators to facilitate the above.

• the 'mini-room' system that totally disconnects writers from the productions they are writing for needs to be broken down.

Definitely a case of "task failed successfully" though, because we cultivate those planets -- making their continued survival all but ensured.

Or they'll just be a smallish instance building the kind of community they want to build. There's nothing wrong with knowing what you want to be and not trying to be more.

IDK, the creator of that instance just started it as a little side project. I don't get the sense they ever really expected for it to blow up or were trying to make it a "main instance".

If anything this is just a reminder that instances aren't nodes in the same service. They will all have their own culture, goals and philosophy.

The Outer Wilds. IMO, non-violence-based gameplay design is an underexplored space, especially in 3-D games. The Outer Wilds manages to feel like a fully-fledged game, rather than a traditional walking simulator, using exploration as it's core gameplay loop.

Further, it's main progression system is you, the out-of-game player, learning about the world. There's no abilities you gain or keys you have to find. You unlock new areas, not as a programmed game mechanic, but as a function of reasoning about what you've discovered and gaining insight into how the game world works. Any playthrough could be beaten in about 15 minutes -- there's nothing physically blocking you from triggering the end of the game -- but it takes you 15 hours or so of flying around the solar system to accrue the necessary insight to get there.

It's really a special game.

Console exclusives are anti consumer and it should be illegal for console makers to offer any incentive to developers -- including studios they own -- to make a game exclusive.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk

A lot (all) nuclear accidents also occurred with older reactor designs.

Traditional nuclear reactors were designed in such a way that they required management to keep the reaction from running away. The reaction itself was self-sustaining and therefore the had to be actively moderated to stay inside safe conditions. If something broke, or was mis-managed, the reaction had a chance of continuing to grow out of control. That's called a melt-down.

As an imperfect analogy, older reactors were water towers. The machinery is keeping the water in an unstable state, and a failure means it comes crashing down to earth

Newer reactrs are designed so they they require active management to keep the reaction going. The reaction isn't self-sustaining, and requires outside power to maintain. If something breaks or is mismanaged, the reaction stops and the whole thing shuts down. That means they can't melt down.

As an imperfect analogy, newer reactors are water pumps. If power is interrupted nothing breaks catastrophically, water just stops moving.

In a meme? Never.

Yeah, they're saying "look, we only have four mods, have a highly targeted type of community we are trying to build, and have had to disproportionately moderate users from these instances" which seems reasonable on it's face.

That's kind of the beauty of Lemmy/Kbin right? You can spin up an instance with whatever rules you want. I think people are reacting to the fact that during the Reddit exodus Beehaw kind of looked like a "default" general instance, including me.

But that's a misreading on our part, not them going back on that.

Holy shit this is so funny.

Now I want to run a DnD campaign where the big bad is a QAnon Dragon.

I know you're being sarcastic but I still want to punch you. So fucking sick of that shit.

Agreed, I grew up in a very conservative area and was pretty homophobic when I started college.

"They can do whatever they want, just don't ask me to like it" was an important stepping stone towards "oh shit, love is love" and finally actually listening to the experience of gay people.

I think Beehaw is being pretty honest about not wanting to be a purely open social media experience. There's a place for that, for sure.

Right, but if you're request for denied for something medically necessary unless you revealed it, you went anyway (because it's necessary), and then you got fired... That feels like it shouldn't be legal (obviously that doesn't mean that it isn't).

IMO, it's always better to try. Worst case scenario is that nothing changes, so no worse than if you didn't. The only sane choice in that kind of situation is to pick the one with a chance for improvement.

In my experience, giving a shit about what you're doing has a bunch of positing knock-on affects as well. You just end up feeling better about yourself. In your specific scenario it sounds like trying would also afford you the opportunity to live a happier life, and that's worth chasing. The world is fucked, but scientists keep saying they if we act soon it's not so fucked they we're past the inflection point to un-fuck it.

They said it's mostly about the amount of moderation action they've had to take against users from those instances. Maybe lemmy.ml has less users who behave badly outside their server?

I could also see there being a reticence to defederate from the "canonical" instance so to speak.

PSA for non-developers: "six-months" in the software world is slang for "optimistically, one year".

I want to point out that critical thinking isn't just about putting the dots together yourself. You can never be an expert on every subject.

Logical systems always begin with a set of assumptions you build on top of. In math and formal logic, these are called axioms. Two parallel lines will never meet; the behavior of gravity is constant, etc. Go back far enough and there will be a set of assumptions that we hold to be true because we have to start somewhere.

Often, misinformation is specifically designed to slot seamlessly into critical thinking techniques by being logically sound... if you build on bad assumptions being simultaneously fed to you.

At some point we have to choose what experts we trust and hold their opinions as soft axioms in our own belief system. Misinformation networks get you by propping up fake "experts" to fill this role, then let you feel "smart" by applying logic to a bad set of starting assumptions.

A huge part of real-world critical thinking is the ability to identify trustworthy experts to do the legwork of studying a specialty field for us, since we can't do it all ourselves.

Sometimes it does feel like my diet just consist mostly of gas giants.

For sure. Like I said, it's totally my bias showing. Maybe it's seeing too many congressmen fundamentally misunderstand the tech. I've also run into a lot of older programmers that are highly technical, but still kind of out-of-touch when it comes to the Internet culture that sits on top of the technical layer.

It depends on whether you consider the conditions under which the original cells were donated as part of the product.

To try and be charitable to the WPT mods: that sub is a magnet for bots and bad actors. All those measures sound like a shotgun approach to combating spam to me.

I really don't envy having to moderate a large politically oriented sub like that. I imagine it burns you out fast to being open and fair-minded in how you approach moderation due to the sheer avalanche of bullshit you're confronted with cleaning up.

That's kind of an oversimplification. The de-federated because they only have four mods and didn't have the ability to effectively moderate all the users from large instances with no vetting process.

The thing is that the court only has so much power right now because Congress is so fucking broken. If Congress where in working order it could just legislate all the shit that the court is blocking the executive on.

I posted a version of this in another thread:

I really think Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon need to figure out a way to have a default terms of service that ships with their product which forbids using the API to collect data for anything outside of user-facing social network interfaces, including account association heuristics and similar processes.

A way for users to set licenses on individual posts would be huge as well, with a default license instance admins can set.

That way for-profit instances could be forced to filter out posts with licenses that do not allow for-profit use. Honestly, even just a simple check mark "[ ] allow for-profit republication", and have two licenses that can be attached: one that allows for-profit use and one that does not.

The fediverse should start baking in data control into it's legal framework. Want to federate with Mastodon? You need to follow the ToS for what you can do with its posts. If we wanted to get really extreme we could even say the license should be copy-left. Any instance that wants to federate with a non-profit instances needs to also be non-profit.

That could block for-profit companies from becoming part of the network in the first place, even by use of stealth relay instances.

#threads

I've noticed the sorting algorithm on Kbin is much better than Lemmy's. Much more churn in the posts when I refresh.

Why not Kbin.social directly? We're federating again!

I would much rather traditional ads than crypto mining. I don't want Kbin or Lemmy to become environmentally unfriendly electricity sinks.

I'm not saying it should be illegal to release games for only one console. Obviously not every studio is going to have the bandwidth to develop for every platform, and some games will use special features of some systems.

What I'm saying is that it should be illegal for console makers to give any special incentives or preference to developers to do so artificially.

You could run metrics on how often you have to moderate users of a given server vs you're own. Hit a certain threshold and that instance is de-federated. Open registration might not mean much if the mods of that instance are proactive about banning people.

But I'm obviously biased. I like the vibe on Kbin and hope we aren't de-federated from Beehaw. I'm signed up to a bunch of communities here.