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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think I may not be presenting my position well, and thus am coming off as a right wing partisan hack of the sort that wants to defund the EPA. That’s not my position.

    A lot of people (mostly conservatives and big businesses) that complain about ‘red tape’ as a way of attacking various regulations. For example, people will say it’s impossible to build a power plant because of environmental red tape.
    A lot of that regulation is positive though. For example, even if the land is cheap, you can’t build a power plant next to a nature preserve because the pollution will kill all the birds. And I like that regulation. The power people will of course complain as will the mines that were going to sell the plant coal. In cases like this, IMHO, they can all fuck off.

    At the same time though, the ‘red tape’ that many businesses complain about does sometimes actually exist. That is, to do business you have to get endless streams of licenses, approvals, permits, etc for things where the bureaucracy and licensing process adds little or no value to either the industry or the population at large.
    From what I’ve read, this sort of thing exists a lot in Germany. I’ve talked to a few people who were starting a business in Europe and they specifically avoided a few countries for that reason.



  • Glad you liked it.
    I would love to have a society where machines do the grunt work so the humans can enjoy our lives and devote ourselves to grander pursuits like art, music, science, space travel, and other forms of creation and discovery and nobody has to spend their days cleaning toilets (unless they want to).
    I think one of the biggest hurdles to this is education. If we’re to be such an enlightened society we need to be smart enough to utilize that. And if we put kids through 12-16 years of school with the primary result of teaching these kids that learning isn’t fun and should be avoided when possible, that society will fail and you get an Idiocracy style future. And a lot of that will need generational change- take the kids of small-minded low-educated parents and teach them to be big-minded and crave knowledge. That’s easier said than done in many cases.
    But of course the other big hurdle is economical. Some sort of universal basic income is a must in such a society, and it would involve a major rethink of how many of our markets work.



  • Me too man, me too. Or at least come and get more people to think that way. I’m all for automation and technology and all that. And I love capitalism. But if a majority of the jobs can be done by machines, capitalism as a concept can start to fail.

    And whatever system we have, should exist in service of the people of the nation, not the other way around. I believe in capitalism because I think it can be good for everybody (with the right regulations of course). But when you have automation to an extreme degree, that changes things. We’re just starting to see that with AI and creative professions, but once robots like Tesla’s Optimus hit the market the same concept will apply to almost any basic job. And it only expands from there.
    There’s a very real possible future where production of almost anything is more or less free. But if the cost of production drops to zero, and the efficiency gains only go to the guy who owns the robot, we have a real problem.

    This story may interest you-
    https://marshallbrain.com/manna1


  • Good piece. I wish it went a little more into how efficiency gain from automation has only helped management and investors, not employers. That is one of the biggest reasons to reject a lot of the technology in my opinion, or at least demand new frameworks and better compensation. Even talk of changing how society works. Because if all the jobs are taken over by robots, then you leave an awful lot of humans with nothing to do and no way to support themselves. But on a broad general scale, machines should work for us and make our lives better rather than the other way around. If the result of a machine is that a few billionaires become trillionaires but thousands of workers become destitute of homeless, that’s not a good trade.


  • The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.


  • Amusing. I remember when Chrome first launched its claim to fame was being super fast. Of course now everybody uses it, and that somehow made websites think it’s okay to add megabytes of slow tracking JavaScript so pages load slowly again. Good to see Firefox is making strides in that direction. Personally I would love to see Google penalize websites that have too much JavaScript and search results. A web page should be clean and efficient and render quickly, if it does not then it is less useful and should be further down.


  • A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what’s missing is defederation policy.

    Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you’re on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I’m on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there’s a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.

    Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that’s due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That’s their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).

    //edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will ‘live’ on your instance, and thus be under your instance’s rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don’t today intend to create any communities, it’s good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.


  • First- understand that everyone goes through this, everybody has an answer for you, but the answer that worked for them may not work for you. There’s no right or wrong answer. A lot of people say ‘the way to get over someone is to get under someone’ personally I’ve never subscribed to that sort of thinking. It leads to unhealthy rebound relationships IMHO.

    The only thing that will really fix this is time. So there is no magic bullet. There are things you can do to help though or pass the time faster. The biggest one is find ways to not ruminate. Focus your attention on other things, ideally useful things. Take some time to improve yourself in fun ways. Hit the gym is an obvious one, but I generally recommend take up a hobby or learn an instrument or take a class. Basically learn some fun new skill and focus your attention on that. It serves as a distraction from your grief, but also a source of engagement and a little happiness.
    It WILL get better.


  • I’d be interested. I have experience moderating Reddit communities (I’m /u/SirEDCaLot over there too).

    I’m Eastern time. But I can’t commit to any specific amount of availability for two reasons. 1. My real life is pretty hectic and many days I literally have no time at all to participate let alone moderate, and 2. Lemmy/Reddit for me is a hobby, not a job, and I have no desire to change that. So my availability is ‘when I have time and feel like doing it’. Sometimes that will mean I disappear for days, sometimes that means I’m on for multiple hours per day.

    What I will say though- is that whatever I do have time to do, I will do well. I believe in treating users with respect, even when they break seemingly simple rules. I’ve found that if you don’t assume bad faith and treat people with respect, even when they appear to be idiots, more often than not they return the gesture.
    I also believe that moderators are more like janitors than gods. So I’m not interested in ‘power’.