There is no universally good investment - it all depends on your priorities, risk appetite and timeframe.
Middle Eastern money
Something tells me the Saudis don't want AI for the betterment of all humanity.
Could be the human rights abuses, dunno.
10 thousand people marching would make world headlines.
No, it wouldn't. Protest is totally normalized now, it's just a pressure release valve that helps keep the status quo running.
Here is a protest that happened today - https://cloudisland.nz/@simplicitarian/113212289035494255
Apparently it involved between 20,000 to 30,000 people - https://cloudisland.nz/@simplicitarian/113212686270895144
It will not be mentioned in any big news media outside of New Zealand.
I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic. She suggests these values:
fostering genuine connection
protecting privacy and enforcing consent
championing accessibility
I think she's obviously right about the first value but the others are less clear. There's certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they're constructed I don't feel like those are really core values. ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare and most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.
It's hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that's a value tho - diversity.
There's a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot. At it's best, this is a "people before economy" value, a pro-democracy, a pro-life (in the literal sense), pro-freedom value. No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.
The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network. Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?
...and yet, here we are talking about climate change. If they'd instead organized a protest of 10,000 people marching for hours it wouldn't have been international news and we wouldn't be talking about climate change.
After almost half a century on death row Iwao Hakamada, 88, has been acquitted of murder.
An 88-year-old man who is the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been acquitted by a Japanese court, after it found that evidence used against him was fabricated.
Iwao Hakamada, who was on death row for almost half a century, was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.
He was recently granted a retrial amid suspicions that investigators may have planted evidence that led to his conviction for quadruple murder.
The only issue is controlling Alex Jones. He's too batshit to ever work under anyone and without him most of the value evaporates.
So now it's up to rich people to decide if Alex Jones gets to stay on the air. Will asshole rich people who want him to continue buy it or will some nice rich people buy it to shut him down?
Not in this case
https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-address/
I look forward to cutting a pizza like that and then trying to convince others to let me have the biggest slice. Or seeming magnanimous by giving them the biggest.
Although, the distribution of the toppings is not equal throughout the pizza - on the edges there is a lot more crust.
I try hard to forget Unit 731.
That wikipedia page is NSFL, deeply disturbing.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/turning-everyday-gadgets-into-bombs-is-a-bad-idea/
That blog post describes how it works in more detail. We now live in a world where any battery could be a bomb, there is no way to detect it and the equipment for making those bomb-batteries costs $15k on Ali Express.
This is over 4x longer than the longest undersea cable in the world
HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km
So 15.75% of the electricity would just vanish. That takes the shine off it a bit although if the price difference is big enough it would still be worth doing.
- Genocide denial
- Fascism
- Racism
- Bad-faith arguments
- Really really stupid & low effort
- Consistently really really negative
- Vote manipulation
- Spam, CSAM
I've banned 1074 accounts from the instance I run, most of them for boring reasons like spam. Usually between 1 and 10 per day.
I probably should have phrased it as "have less children" :)
My list was based on the book "How Bad Are Bananas" which goes into depth about the carbon emissions from various things, including children.
I'm not 100% sure that attributing the emissions of a child to their parents is correct 'accounting'. Maybe only their emissions until age 18? Still, all the emissions caused by that child and it's descendants would not have happened if it wasn't for the decision their parents made to create it. Accounted for this way, there is no doubt this is the most impactful decision someone in a developed country can make (that was the framing the OP used so I went with that) but it is not the most likely to happen, most practical or most moral option.
Organic Maps was put back onto the Play Store the next day day: https://organicmaps.app/news/2024-08-18/good-news-organic-maps-appeared-again-in-the-google-play-store/
- Don't have children
- Don't build a house with concrete (incl foundation)
- Public transport and cycling
- No beef and minimize dairy products
TIL, if anyone is curious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_incident
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Takes 2.5 minutes to build up but well worth the wait!
Same and went to the killing field outside the city later on. The driver cried when talking about the family members he lost. Most harrowing day of my life, totally redefined the lower limit of "how badly things can go wrong".
Osama Bin Laden got what he wanted
You need to install some things ("build dependencies") before installing this app. Examine the documentation to see what those things are.
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Starts pretty heavy on the vocals but gets proper trancy about 1 minute in.
The original mix of this came out around 2000.
Much more at https://fediverse-governance.github.io/
Former President Barack Obama, former first lady Michelle Obama and second gentleman Doug Emhoff spoke Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention. Follow here for the latest live news updates, speeches, analysis and more.
We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).
As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.
ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.
That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.
To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.
This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.
Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
Just a quick note to recognize that the first lines of PieFed code were published on the 28th July 2023, just over a year ago. Since then there have been 1400+ changes made by 9 people, involving adding 88,000 lines of code and removing 28,000 lines. The issue queue has 98 open and 99 closed issues.
While join.piefed.social went live in October 2023, it wasn't until time off work over the christmas holidays enabled a big push to get it ready that piefed.social went live on 4th January 2024.
Since then piefed.social has federated 190k posts, 2.3M comments and 19M votes with 1900 other instances of various types. Besides piefed.social there are 5 other PieFed instances that I know of.
What a year it's been! I've grown significantly as a developer, had a lot of fun and hopefully contributed something meaningful to whatever the fediverse is becoming. Long may it continue!
Offers available now until August 19, 2024.
Finally time to pull the trigger on this one!
EA has a big sale on lots of other titles, too.
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NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio has released a video showing how wind and air currents pushed CO2 emissions around Earth’s atmosphere from January to March 2020. The video’s high-resolution zooms in and sees individual sources of CO2, including power plants and forest fires.
This global map of carbon dioxide was created using a model called GEOS, short for the Goddard Earth Observing System. GEOS is a high-resolution weather reanalysis model, powered by supercomputers, that is used to represent what was happening in the atmosphere — including storm systems, cloud formations, and other natural events. This model pulls in billions of data points from ground observations and satellite instruments – and has a resolution is more than 100 times greater than your typical weather model.
More at https://www.universetoday.com/167872/our-carbon-dioxide-emissions-have-a-mesmerizing-side/
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.
In this paper the author highlights how both engineers and social scientists misinterpret the relationship between technology and society. In particular he attacks the narrative, widespread among engineers, that technological artifacts, such as software, have no political properties in themselves and that function or efficiency are the only drivers of technological design and implementation.
Move the dots until none of the lines overlap.
A fresh look at the CSS grid template areas and how to take advantage of its full potential today.
> > > CSS Grid support has been widely available since March 2017 in all major browsers. Yet, here we are in 2024, and I still see few people using the grid template areas feature. > >
> > > It’s no surprise that many avoid template areas as making sense of the grid is challenging enough. In this interactive article, I aim to shed light on this feature and, hopefully, convince you to use it more often. Once you see the simplicity and power of template areas, you may reach for them much more frequently. > >
US campaign funds make Scrooge McDuck's money bin pale. At the forefront: the cryptocurrency industry. Molly White brings light into the darkness.
The largest crypto super PAC is called Fairshake and is practically the same size as Make America Great Again (MAGA), the main super PAC supporting Donald Trump, who is making his fourth run at the White House: MAGA has raised $178.6 million through the end of May, Fairshake $177.9 million.
A page with a million checkboxes. Checking a box checks it for everyone.
That's it. Have fun!
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Creatures of Place is an insight into the wonderful world of Artist as Family: Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, and their youngest son, Woody. Living on a 1/4-acre section in a small Australian town, Meg and Patrick have designed their property using permaculture principals.
They grow most of their own food, don't own cars and ride their bikes instead, use very little electricity, and forage food and materials from their local forest.
In her first in-depth interview after her arrest for shoplifting, she tells John Campbell it was an act of "self-sabotage."
Former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman has given her first in-depth interview after her arrest for shoplifting and subsequent resignation from Parliament, telling 1News it was an act of "self-sabotage."