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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • Like evasive chimpanzee said we need to poop INDIRECTLY in crops. Hot aerobic composting for example has excellent nutrient retention rates and eliminates nearly all human borne diseases. The main problem would be medication since some types tend to survive.

    Also urine contains almost all of the water soluble nutrients that we expel and is sanitised with 6-12 months of anaerobic storage. So that’s potentially an easier solution if we can seclude the waste stream. Again the main issue would be medications.

    I don’t have the answer, if it was easy we would have done it already. The main issue is we don’t have a lot of people working on the answer because we’re still in the stage of getting everyone in the world access to sanitation. Certainly the way we’re doing it is very energy and resources intensive, unsustainable in the living term, and incredibly damaging to the environment. We’ve broken a fundamental aspect of the nutrient cycle and we’re paying dearly for it.

    The other problem is, like recycling, there isn’t a lot of money in the solution, so it’s hard to move forward in a capitalist system until shit really hits the fan.


    1. We mine and manufacture nutrient dense fertilizer at massive environmental cost.
    2. We use the nutrients to grow plants
    3. We eat the nutrients in our food
    4. We expel 95% of these nutrients in our waste
    5. We dump our waste into the rivers and oceans with all the nutrients (often we purposefully destroy the nitrogen in the waste since it causes so much damage to rivers and oceans)
    6. We need new nutrients to grow plants

    Before humans there was a nutrient cycle. Now it’s just a pipe from mining to the ocean that passes through us. The ecological cost of this is immeasurable, but we don’t notice because fertilizer helps us feed starving people and waste management is important to avoid disease.

    We need to close the loop again!



  • That income is high enough to be taxed more, but I agree more granularity would be better. I hope that they increase taxes on the rich mostly by closing loopholes that favour the 1% at our expense. A billionaire that pays no taxes now isn’t going to owe more if we increase the tax rate. 3 times 0 is still 0. It’s the loopholes we have to close.

    It’s not usually the doctors making 250-400k that are shirking their fair share of taxes, but the use of loopholes certainly starts in that range and accelerates exponentially with higher wealth and income.


  • Usually in North America bidet refers to a modified insert or toilet seat that includes a sprayer and a lever to control. It doesn’t take up any space at all. Definitely a stand alone bidet takes up a lot of space but they’re visually non existent in North America, although I certainly would prefer that to the sprayers.






  • I understand your point, but disagree.

    We tend to think of these models as agents or persons with a right to information. They “learn like we do” after all. I think the right way to see them is emulating machines.

    A company buys an empty emulating machine and then puts in the type of information is would like to emulate or copy. Copyright prevents companies from doing this in the classic sense of direct emulation already.

    LLM companies are trying to push the view that their emulating machines are different enough from previous methods of copying that they should be immune to copyright. They tend to also claim that their emulating machines are in some way learning rather than emulating, but this is tenuous at best and has not yet been proven in a meaningful sense.

    I think you’ll see that if you only feed an LLM art or text from only one artist you will find that most of the output of the LLM is clearly copyright infringement if you tried to use it commercially. I personally don’t buy the argument that just because you’re mixing several artists or writers that it’s suddenly not infringement.

    As far as science and progress, I don’t think that’s hampered by the view that these companies are clearly infringing on copyright. Copyright already has several relevant exemptions for educational and private use.

    As far as “it’s on the internet, it’s fair game”. I don’t agree. In Western countries your works are still protected by copyright. Most of us do give away those rights when we post on most platforms, but only to one entity, not anyone/ any company who can read or has internet access.

    I personally think IP laws as they are hold us back significantly. Using copyright against LLMs is one of the first modern cases where I think it will protect society rather than hold us back. We can’t just give up all our works and all our ideas to a handful of companies to copy for profit just because they can read and view them and feed them en masse into their expensive emulating machines.

    We need to keep the right to profit from our personal expression. LLMs and other AI as they currently exist are a direct threat to our right to benefit from our personal expression.





  • LMAO… ‘Despite’ the devastation…

    That’s like if your dog bit the neighbour, but then the neighbor killed your whole family and burned your house down and a journalist said “despite the loss of of everything he owned and everyone he loves, he now says he was happy his dog at least got one in first”

    What kind of degenerate reporting uses obvious normal human reactions to tragedy to score political points and dehumanize innocent civilians.


  • Lol the place that must not be named.

    It’s a numbers game. Getting engagement and knowing your audience are skills. The fediverse is a small place compared to meta. Being a big player in the fediverse for most posters is like being in the best team in a college league. Meta joining with 500-2000x the users is like suddenly having to compete at a national professional level. Certainly a few players have the skill, but most will get benched in no time.

    Maybe I’m wrong and I hope that I am, but I certainly know most default sub comments at the other place had no upvotes, no replies, and were at the bottom of the thread never to be seen. On here, nearly every comment i see or post has SOME engagement (like this discussion!). It’s a different game when you have hundreds of millions to billions of users.


  • You wouldn’t create a meta account. But I know I consume a lot more content than I create. Probably 1% of social media users create 80% of the content. If meta joined, the users that make most fediverse content now will see their engagement drop. There will likely not be a good reason for them to post at all since, in all likelihood, that content has already been posted by a meta user or reposted with more engagement.

    Eventually they’ll stop posting because it won’t be fun. At this point almost all content will be meta content, and most activity pub clients will be “alternative meta clients” in practice. If/When meta leaves, the fediverse will likely have a fraction of the content it has now, it’ll be a ghost town and have a long and hard road to recovery.

    That’s not to mention the other problems in the article.


  • When a big corporation like Walmart moves into a neighborhood it kills the small stores because it delivers most of what people want more effectively. Then when Walmart closes shops to consolidate those neighborhoods don’t go back to the way they were, they now have no stores.

    There is a lot of content in the fediverse that wouldn’t exist with meta, because meta users would provide better content, more discussion, and more votes would mean more granularity so better content rises higher. That would stop a lot of the people who post content on activity pub. They would be too late and have too little engagement to be relevant. Those people don’t magically reappear if meta decides that activity pub was just a bad mistake.


  • I don’t see any large leaps.

    If threads uses activity pub, most activity pub users will be meta users using the meta client. Meta will not feel the pressure to conform to the activity pub implementation. They could add features as they want since all their users will use their client. This will cause a sudden incompatibility and the fediverse will have to be the one to fix the problem.

    If the fediverse wants to update the protocol to add a feature, we’d have to run it by meta first since they would have to update their client. If they drag their feet it would be hard to force the update knowing it will disconnect the majority of users from the fediverse.

    It’s the same situation described in the article with Google and XMPP.

    I don’t see any leaps or jumps. This could be how meta kills the fediverse and we’d be walking into it eyes wide open.


  • Small and medium (and even large) companies investing in talent instead of commercial solutions is the solution to improving FOSS. I know it has downsides, as you stated, but there are significant upsides. FOSS is cheaper than a custom solution, and the company only has to pay for the modifications it wants to see. The whole community then benefits from their hard work adding features and maintaining the software.

    I’m not saying that it’s the BEST idea for every company. All I’m saying is not to discount FOSS out of hand for these companies. There are significant advantages for companies that should be weighed against the cons. This kind of advocacy is also important in furthering the FOSS model.