Drink water instead of soda, alcohol, other sugary drinks. Eventually you’ll find yourself to be an expert water connoisseur and prefer water over pretty much all beverages.
There’s a difference between high quality plastic performing filtration while it’s cold plastic and cold water vs crap plastic that’s regularly exposed to high temperatures during transport and storage with the same water contained the entire time.
Maybe, I’m no expert. But, I’ve seen a test showing a consumer water filter increasing microplastics by 1000%. Could just be only that specific filter or filter type. I believe it was a Zero filter, which I think uses resin beads for ion exchange.
Interesting, I used ZeroWater for a while … and know others that do. But yeah, searching around it seems it’s only ConsumerLabs.com that came up with that result and all other filters were removing microplastics.
I have a water filter at home. I never use bottled water. Almost every public space also has clean and safe water so if you bring a reusable water bottle with you, you’ll have free water everywhere.
Yep. This is due to variations in the gravitational magnitude at any point from the earth, moon, sun, and other bodies, as well as the periodicity of the earth/moon/sun rotations interacting with friction (between the sea and the sea, the sea and the atmosphere, and the sea and the lithosphere), and creating a giant standing wave (which is constantly changing, like an instrument or a musical composition) of ocean water all over the earth. This doesn’t even take into account atmospheric pressure and water temperature/viscosity variations. The earth is a complex system with waves upon waves upon waves of interacting coupled oscillations all interfering with each other. Whoa 😳
Phytoplankton produce 50-85% of all the oxygen on Earth, and cyanobacteria did even more before them. Before all this free oxygen could float around in the air, all the metals in the ocean had to be oxidized, which is where the massive banded iron formations come from, and then all the minerals in the crust had to oxidize too. Every layer of Earth’s surface was radically changed by this, taking a billion years and likely prompting the evolution of eukaryotes.
And more. Major river discharge can raise the sea level in the area. Then big circular currents similar like when you stirr your cup of coffee or tea. Or chocolate milk 🤤
The tides and ordinary waves caused by wind will appear as moving hills.
The daily tides happen from the moon pulling the water towards the line between the moon and earth. This forms the tides that go around the globe everyday. It happens on both sides of the globe, like this:
The topological map shows something else than tides and moving waves though.
The globe isn’t perfectly round. It’s shaped like an irregular geoid, almost shaped like an ellipsoid, but not exactly. The ocean surface topological map takes the usual tides in account and maps the surface in relation to the geoid, so it shows where the water level is higher or lower than it would be if it was perfectly distributed.
The earth’s gravitational field is not perfectly regular, so it will pull more water towards certain areas, and there are things like ocean currents and the regular trade winds happening from Earth’s rotation, all shaping the sea in hills and valleys that are not just waves. These variations span large areas and doesn’t appear as much in relation to the tides. It basically just goes to show that sea level is not at all level. For instance, the east coast of USA has a higher sea level than the west coast. If sea levels should rise from melting ice, it is therefore more likely to spill over the east coast than the west coast.
I just watched that video of the white cabbage larva with the smaller larvae exiting its body. Jeez, it’s still alive after THAT? Life’s rich pageant, I guess.
I worked at a tree farm in my teens and honestly if I could still do that making what I make now I would be all over that. Always outside, in great shape, got to run heavy machinery, it was great.
That’s crazy to me because I had the exact opposite experience. I went in hoping for a certain amount, and they offered me knowing full well what I was hoping for, 20,000 more. Plus all the other benefits like video games and dogs at work. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad experience with startups except that your job is essentially temporary cuz they will either close or sell
That or dumb money is just dumb, and if the cost of money is free, you can just guess at things that might work with thousands of monkeys hitting typewriters.
Hah I was about to say that only bad part of startups that I’ve had was that you weren’t sure if you’d have a job six months from now. I probably just got lucky and jumped on board during the “throw cash at everything phase”
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares.
It’s one of those things where the very tankies you’re talking about made it trivial for anyone not wanting to interact with them, their instance, or anyone in specific can just block whatever. And then there’s the instances that defederate from .ml and/or grad, which is a decent amount of them.
They may be assholes (though they tend not to be in interpersonal ways, only in their political views), but they’re assholes nobody has to interact with for very long.
I mean, we should probably care at least enough to make sure they’re not smuggling in any backdoors that would allow them take over the entire Lemmyverse.
I know it’s open source so that’s somewhat difficult to accomplish but not impossible (see the recent stealth attack on SSH/OpenSSL). At the very least, it requires people from outside their echo chamber to regularly review commits being made made before admins begin rolling out new updates.
But there supposedly are people doing just that. Been too long since I ran across it here, but when the last big version change happened, some of the instance running folks looked over the code, and found nothing hinky. I know my asshole cousin has his own instance, and he said he scanned through it a little out of curiosity and “it ain’t the prettiest” was the worst he had to say about it. Which, second hand info like that is like toilet paper, but it serves okay for a casual conversation like this.
I would hope so, since it’s THEIR hardware it’s running on (or in case it’s rented, responsible for).
But as long as they don’t put anything iffy into the code and leave their political opinions separate from that, they can certainly run their own instance however they please. That’s the whole point of Lemmy after all.
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares
The 730 people who upvoted this post do care.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
Usually I’d agree with this, but on this post, the upvote count is a direct representation of how many people care about this issue (out of the number of users who saw this post). That is meaningful.
I don’t have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it’s a matter of general principle in my opinion.
It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don’t engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can’t see those numbers, so it’s kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.
But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they’re a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they’re the only metric available.
Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there’s significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.
In my view, upvotes are too easy to manipulate to take them seriously or expect authenticity. And I’m ok with that. I think Reddit and the like showed that karma and the like are not great measures of authentic engagement.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them.
Agreed. Maybe I should try creating and managing a community some day. (hopefully this didn’t come off as sarcastic)
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
This is a wildly misleading and unfair comparison. Let’s take the Trump verdict as an example. The most upvoted post about this had ~2700 upvotes. But that’s only 6% of the MAU! Is that “nobody”? Obviously not. 2k upvotes is a huge deal on a rather small community like Lemmy. How often do you see posts with more than 3k upvotes?
~500 upvotes is already a moderately large number of upvotes. You need to compare this number with how many upvotes a post typically gets.
Fwiw (our disagreement aside), moderating a community anywhere online can be a very rewarding, and very thankless job. And it really can be a thing that feels like a job if the community is active enough.
But I would still recommend at least trying it for a few months to see if whatever subject matter you make it around draws users. That’s when you get a real feel for moderation, and have the best chance at helping the overall fediverse work well.
I also think that moderating a big community would change your mind at least partially regarding vote numbers as a measure of anything significant. There’s behind the curtain stuff that usually gives a better indication of how a given post/subject is being received by the individual community. It depends on the tools available, and lemmy is a wee bit scant on tools to help moderators gain understanding of the population of their C/; but it’s still eye opening.
The biggest thing I think you’d notice in comparing people interacting with a given post is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that. And that’s the ones that bother to vote. A lot of people don’t. They’ll click a link, maybe open that post and read comments, but just not care enough to do anything else at all. Back on reddit, that was a majority of posts, and I know it was the case on other forums back in the day.
So, yeah, disagreement about the numbers in this case aside, if you’re this interested in how a vote using forum works, moderating your own would be a very cool experience on top of diversifying the instance/community balance.
I’d be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
That would be interesting indeed! I heard that if one hosts their own Lemmy instance, they can see who voted on every post. Don’t have that for now though.
I have Lemmy.ml blocked and I still see them in other communities all the time. Defederation is the best solution for dealing with an instance that’s designed to spread propaganda.
And no this isn’t a dead horse, there’s are other discussions ongoing about defederating Lemmy.ml
Malicious propaganda isn’t a non-problem. I’d like a social media platform that doesn’t have any governments openly pumping their lies into the conversation.
Your last sentence is contradictory with the meaning of “beating a dead horse” with the usage of the phrase I’m aware of.
To beat a dead horse isn to waste effort at an impossible or pointless goal.
When I used the phrase, it was with the second meaning in mind, but the first partially applies if op wanted anyone to do anything about the situation because the dev team isn’t exactly open to some kind of takeover. The most that could realistically happen is that everyone leave lemmy entirely. Except for the tankies, obviously, why would they leave?
Since anyone that has spent enough time on lemmy to be called a regular user has run across the whole issue at least once, that means that if OP was wanting to raise awareness, the post was also pointless in that regard because it’s kinda impossible to raise awareness past common knowledge and achieve anything useful.
Now, maybe our usage of the phrase “beating a dead horse” isn’t the same. Language is funny like that. Maybe you just disagree that the post has no point, or that the point it does have might achieve something useful. That’s cool, no worries, disagreements like that are healthy and fun.
I will say that in the first part of your comment, you actually echoed the point that I made; it is trivial to minimize/block instances in one way or another, including defederation. Defederation is an instance decision, not a personal one. But it is also a personal decision which instance/s we use to interact with the fediverse. There are instances that do not federate with lemmy.ml, and there’s a ton that don’t with lemmygrad.
So, based on that, I would even argue that, since we have the freedom to choose our instance (with the consent of the host of the instance of course), trying to get an instance that doesn’t already defederate from lemmy.ml to do so approaches pointless since all of the major instances have been around for a while now, and have already taken part in that debate. Maybe you could change someone’s mind with yet another rehash of the same debate, it does happen. But, again, all the major instances have had this debate multiple times, and the hosts don’t seem open to changing just because someone brings it up again.
New instances? Absolutely have to decide if they want to federate with any of the “iffy” instances. And every user has to decide if they’d rather stick with a given instance that doesn’t match their preferences regarding federation. But, uh, the instance this was posted on isn’t new. The user that posted it isn’t exactly new either. So the fact that they haven’t already made a choice, but instead decided to beat a dead horse (again, using the “pointless” rather than “impossible” usage of the phrase) seems a bit meh.
What do you mean by “it’s standard”? As in that is the intended functionality? It shouldn’t be — the whole point of blocking instances is for the user to be able to, well, block an instance, ie content originating from it no longer shows up.
Yes, and absolutely, No! If you’ve built a rapport with somebody, and you trust them, then yes listen to them. If you feel uncomfortable with them, then get a second (or third) opinion. If you’re ever unsure about why your doctor suggested something, ask them questions. If they wave you off or get offended, then maybe they don’t have your best interest at heart, and are more concerned for their pride.
The point is, you are your only advocate*. If you do not stand up for yourself, no one else will. It’s also important to note that your mind is yours alone. Only you know how you feel, what you think, and can make decisions based on your thoughts. Do your best to convey them to others as you can, but give yourself grace in that you can’t always make people understand you.
There are always exceptions, and some people cannot advocate for themselves. In my non-medical opinion, OP doesn’t sound like someone who cannot advocate for themselves.
Same. Both of these companies have done acquisitions over the years, all promising better prices and more jobs when the end result is poorer quality products at the same or higher price and less jobs overall.
Xmpp is old and has no traction. Matrix is new and there are many people believing in it. There is a lot of money put on matrix. A lot of people want matrix to succeed. Especially companies, agencies and governments love matrix. Jumping on a train that already moves forward is easier than trying to push a standing train.
With xmpp, or signal I’ve got all my messages on my device. Distributing the info to other devices is difficult. With matrix everything sits on the server and distributes the info to the clients. That’s like my file cloud, or my photo cloud or my music server, or my document server. Everything is saved centrally on a server and all is independent of the consumer device. I can use multiple devices and everything sits on the server. That’s great for me as a user, it’s easy.
Xmpp is scattered which is great on one hand but matrix development is moving very fast. Xmpp can’t compete with that.
What’s the advantage of xmpp over signal for the end user?
Everyone ends up on MS Teams because they bundle it with Office365, so execs have the choice of “free” or another $12/mo/user for Slack. It immediately makes it a case of “justify how Slack is so much better we spend thousands on it when Microsoft gives us Teams for free”. Those execs don’t use chat software in the first place.
No, not always. I know of a very major firm that uses google suite for everything but chat and video calls. They use MS Teams because its just that much better than google's alternative. From the chats Ive had, the issue with Slack there is that someone high up in their IT stack hates it.
At a previous job (Microsoft shop but in the public sector so 10 years behind), the standard messenger when I started was Skype for Business.
In case you’ve never used Skype for Business, it’s “Skype” in branding only and actually has nothing to do with the Skype software that Microsoft purchased and is more like MSN Messenger.
Compared to that, Teams is a huge step up.
Also, at a Microsoft shop, you have to use what Microsoft provides even though it’s usually balls.
It’s 90% of the reason I now refuse to work anywhere that’s bought into the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s just so… mediocre
I agree, but we should always compare to what is better and strive for that. Otherwise we get the situation today where the argument to take a product over another is that it’s less bad than the old one
I also had this uneasy feeling watching the video. It certainly felt a bit like a cog in the military industrial machine. While the actual content of the video wasn’t exactly bad in my opinion, I don’t know how I feel about pitching anti-terror or war machines to children through the lens of, “Engineering is cool!” That said, there are many more examples of that pitch out in the world in other forms. I do think Mark could be more careful especially when he is directly promoting a company in the defense industry.
Unfortunately engineering and military have a huge overlap in the US. It’s kind of inescapable. I found out recently that Destin from Smarter Every Day also worked for a weapons manufacturer before starting YouTube. These people just don’t want to think about the fact that they probably have blood on their hands.
I am well aware of this overlap and it doesn’t come as a surprise. I perhaps wish more of these creators acknowledged the military industrial complex and addressed what it means for their content and for the world of engineering.
I don’t think Destin’s ever been real shy about his connections. Huntsville is basically nothing but NASA and missile companies, and he did a multi-part series where he lived on an active US Navy sub for two days.
There’s a difference between showing off a technological marvel like a nuclear submarine and not really focusing on its applications as a weapon, versus showing off a weapon and being like “it’s so cool to kill ‘bad guys’ with this stuff”
And yeah he probably hasn’t been shy about it, I don’t watch his videos religiously. I found out during his excellent talk on the Artemis program. IIRC, he mentioned he helped design missile countermeasures, which is pretty tame as military industrial complex goes, but it’s still participating in the amelioration of killing machines, which doesn’t sit right with me. And he talked about it so nonchalantly, like he hadn’t considered that the people at the end of the barrel of the weapons he was helping design obviously were the “bad guys”
I still have a ton of respect for the guy and his educational outreach work, and I don’t hold it against him, I just don’t get how someone could sleep at night knowing that they helped make weapons more efficient at killing people.
He worked for the military as a missile test engineer, even did an interview with a four star general. The general described the video he was making (the interview i mean) as a weapon
If you take a look into the fitness bubble on YouTube you will see military propaganda too. They’re often competing against real soldiers/SEALS/whatever to demonstrate how well prepared they’re are in the case of war. Back in the subject of engineering, William Osman was also sponsored by the Navy (I think) one time.
I don’t know how I feel about pitching anti-terror or war machines to children through the lens of, “Engineering is cool!” That said, there are many more examples of that pitch out in the world in other forms.
Kids have been sold military toys since forever. GI Joe, tin soldiers, toy guns, toy armor and swords, model kits of tanks and fighter aircraft…
Contest the performance review in writing. You can do it nicely, and factually. Put out a timeline with as factual of a tone that you can. But I would put it on the record and print the email and take it home with you and put in a safe place. Something like this can be used to justify a firing if not corrected.
And yes I know what at will employment is, but putting on record also helps avoid this being used as a pretext for some other illegal firing (e.g., age, gender, race, union activity).
Or someone talking shit about you to other companies - you can sue over that, but again, it helps if you have a record that supports it.
Overall, though: yeah, fuck that company. Go somewhere that you're valued and start finding a good reference at the place you're at. Coworkers that you worked on projects with can work if you don't have someone you reported to that's honest.
After my rage has subsided, I will do this. I spent 3 months under a microscope because of this incident and proved that it wasn’t as big a deal as they (management) were told and that it was not my fault. But, apparently, it’s a great excuse to justify denying me a raise. I will contest the decision if possible.
Yeah. Angry emails aren't great. But good to get on record before too long.
Write it all out now, and have a friend do a tone edit.
Or post it here and the Internet can do it for you. And hope your employer doesn't do a search on text.
I’ll say something like “I don’t see why a fancy python script should be allowed to vote” and the youth will be like “that’s so fucked up in so many ways”. “My best friend is an AI why are you so prejudiced”.
Oh weird I used to know the guy who played the AI there. Not close or anything. Friend of a friend situation. Saw him on the street last year and had an awkward “…hey” moment and everything.
When I read the Lambda transcripts of that Google employee (priest?) who tried to whistleblow that that Google’s AI was sentient… I mean damn, I read those transcripts, it sounded real as hell.
Stochastic parrot or not, I think a significant part of my own consciousness goes towards predicting the next word in a given context.
IIRC, consciousness is really, really complicated. We might not be capable of knowing if we are LLMs in meatsuits. An LLM might be a highly vocal infant, and we simply wouldn’t have a great way of really making that judgement. Shit, we still can’t define consciousness in humans–or other animals–in any meaningful way.
Agreed. I think it’s a spectrum, and even a chair (an object that forms a feedback loop of forces with its surroundings that depends on its previous state) is conscious to a degree.
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