I looked into container houses and I’d absolutely love a house that I can move from city to city. Moving without packing shit up. I just wish they weren’t as heavy and a bit wider.
I’d also love the idea of “stacks” where you can slot in your container home into a vertical grid. The problem is that you generally want your entry to be on the long side, so you’d need lots of corridors in such a stack.
Right? It was such a roller coaster ride with rather empty calories. But to be honest I didn’t like the book that much either, more like the start of an interesting universe. The first novel in The Culture series wasn’t that great either.
Zodiac signs are literally constellations… Which are quite real.
Astrology is also real, in the fact that it’s a uselessly real thing. Women love it though. Same with tarot. All you do is make plausible sounding shit up and then they placebo themselves into happiness or nocebo into a sour mood.
In Dutch we don’t use the Latin names for zodiac signs (and we call them “sterrenbeelden”, which means “star images” or maybe “star statues”). Aquarius is “waterman”, which I guess would translate to (surprise) “water man”.
Why? Not sure, but it might be because of Simon Stevin who insisted we use Dutch words for mathematical concepts, and thought up some words like “evenwijdig” (“same distancey”) for “parallel” and “wiskunde” (“certainty knowledge”) for mathematics.
I agree, and I love how it has these younger words with a vivid etymology, how it shares so many common roots with English, German, the Scandinavian languages, and a serving of French, but also sprinkles of many other languages from its seafaring and otherwise trading history. And I love the grammar rules that allow one to be precise and concise in many things (but there we must definitely bow to German).
Literally, “water man” is correct. But I would translate it a bit more loosely as “water bearer”.
Most, if not all, names of zodiac signs in Dutchare are literal translations from Latin. But while most people understand that Leo means Lion, how many know Cancer is Latin for crab?
Water bearer makes much more sense, thanks! I did notice the images where a guy carries a jug, but as a kid, I always imagined the water man to be some kind of elemental, and I never consciously challenged that idea. Haha.
Gemini, Virgo, Libra and Sagittarius also are not animals. Almost half of them isn’t. But you’re technically correct that ‘most’ is. Which is the best kind of correct.
Only half of the Zodiacs are inspired from real animals. Gemini is two humans, Virgo is a virgin woman, Libra is a Weighing Scale, Sagittarius is a Centaur with a bow, Capricorn is a Sea Goat, and Aquarius is… a cup of water, I guess?
That’s like saying Huckleberry Finn doesn’t exist. Just because it’s made-up doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It exists as a concept which billions of people understand.
The Sun’s position on the ecliptic at the vernal equinox is not a “concept”, it’s a physical reality, recognised by the International Astronomical Union.
And the astrology signs exist as a concept as recognized by thousands of years of human history dating back to Babylonia 2 BCE. Yes we understand that they’re likely completely bogus, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
Disagree on the semantics. Physical realities are concepts as well. “Energy”, despite being an extremely useful physical measurement, is an abstract concept. “Physical realities” and “concepts” are not mutually exclusive nor antonymous words.
In this case, the Aries/vernal point is a concept used to define coordinate systems using physical measures from Earth.
I think it is pretty clear in the context of the joke that they weren’t saying the concept doesn’t exist they were saying the attributes of the concept doesn’t exist.
I’m telling you, there will be a streaming service that will deepfake ads into finished movies. Darth Vader will turn at the at the camera and say “No, I am your father… and you should buy the Elon Musk biography on audible dot com for free”
The catch is that you’re signing up for a recurring subscription, and Audible plays the hard sell when you try to cancel your subscription.
(If you’re determined though, this can be great for you. I think I’ve gotten a total of 5 or 6 audiobooks for free from Audible thanks to their free first month and “please don’t leave” unsubscribe flow and “please come back” emails.)
I was at a Cracker Barrel last night and among the random shit on their walls was an old checker board. The border of the board, taking the majority of the space available, was covered in ads. I guess it never changes.
That’s been going on since Blockbuster was a growth company. Like 20 years ago, for the TV (or maybe DVD, I forget which) release of Get Shorty, they 'shopped in an Oldsmobile Sillouette minivan as a product placement, replacing the original vehicle.
“Its the Cadillac of minivans.”
edit: Actually, the Olds was the one in the theatrical release, which got replaced with another make/model for TV. All the releases I can find so far include the Sillouette.
Slow down there, Satan. I kid you not, I had someone approach me to help develop technology like this a long time ago. The idea was to break into video streams at the ISP and insert advertising on the fly w/o prior approval.
My reaction, after realizing this person wanted to turn the internet into an ad-encrusted wasteland*, was: “What happens when that video stream is something live with a LOT of money behind it, like the Superbowl?” The legal and professional ramifications didn’t even clock with this guy. It was squarely in the “not my problem” category.
(* More-so than it is now. I’m not saying we’re getting off light, but this guy was a-okay with making everything look like the hallway bulletin board in a college dorm.)
Exactly. I tell this story to remind people that cynics aren’t just old cranks on internet forums. They’re also salespeople that decided to make some cash on our way to (consumer) hell, and they’re entitled to a turn at holding the pitchfork.
I’m actually pro-container housing, but for different reasons than these capitalist pig-dogs. They’re portable, easily customizable with the right know-how (easy to add expansions, and to move around different units to change the layout) and reuses the hollow remnants of this capitalistic hellscape for something worthwhile.
I agree, practically in every scenario where we see dystopian things happening, the underlying problem is capitalism as opposed to technology being abused by it.
Can you elaborate on that? Structurally they’re quite a bit sturdier than typical residential construction. You need doors and windows, but that’s a matter of cutting holes with a plasma torch. You can use 2x2 and foam board on the inside, and partially bury them in earth for the bulk of insulation, while running ducting, etc. under a raised floor. You certainly have limited space layouts–a CalKing bed ain’t fitting–but that’s not necessarily a deal breaker.
Personally, I lean more towards Quonset huts for inexpensive and durable construction.
They have too many downsides. Most of them aren’t actually reusing containers because they’re usually too small and they’re coated with toxic materials that prevent mold and pests from living in them. They look large enough at first, but this is before you have to install a floor and walls and a ceiling with insulation all around and plumbing and electrical, etc. In addition, if you want to add windows by cutting into the sides, you’ve just undermined the structural integrity of the thing, as it’s premised on being exactly that (stackable) box. So then you have to reinforce the crap out of it if you want windows.
Putting all of that together, to safely put together a reasonably livable container home, you’re basically just using it as an aesthetic piece, as you’ve had to buy the shell new and then spend the rest of your budget trying to make it actually work as a home. It’s cheaper and better to build a small home with commodity materials unless you really, really want that aesthetic.
I had a job modifying them before. We actually completely removed the support bars in the middle. It does not compromise the structural integrity at all. They’re only nessessary if you’re filling them up with shit and stacking them up dozens of units high. You can then add walls, ceilings, and roofs that pop up out of the side of the structure, expanding the size from the initial footprint.
And if you have multiple units, you can connect and expand your living space that way. Get sick of the current layout? You can rearrange the units relatively easy, and if you ever want to move, it’s a hell of a lot easier to move than a full sized house.
It’s also possible to remove the toxic coating. It’s not imbued into the metal.
While they’re not without their downsides, that goes for every type of structure and every type of building material. Alot of the downsides you listed though are non-issues and I know this because of my own experience working on them. The biggest downsides are cost (which isn’t the best indicator of viability, capitalism skews our perception of value with cost) and the fact that simply put… They’re pretty fucking ugly.
The side walls are actually very important for the structural integrity of shipping containers. If you cut holes in it, it absolutely needs to be reinforced or your new roof line is going to sag over time. They’re built as cheaply as possible to accomplish their exact task, which is holding a bunch of crap and being stackable, and the side walls provide both tension to hold together the frame (basically a box) and to provide rigidity to both floor and the top. I reeeally hope y’all reinforced the areas around windows.
You can do a bunch of things to shipping containers to make them viable, but it’s far more expensive in materials and time than just building with more raw materials. You can remove the toxic coating but you have to have a whole human do the labor for that and do is safely, otherwise that human is paying for that decision with their health. The materials and labor for that aren’t nothing.
When you look at what is actually used from the container in order to create a house, it’s really not that much. Basically just framing of questionable stability and some corrugated metal siding, possibly the cheapest and easiest part of building a house. I can personally frame up something container-sized in less than a day, easy peasy. Siding and drywall are also easy. The harder parts are everything the container doesn’t provide: foundation, vapor barriers, plumbing, electrical, a good roof, any specialized need for insulation, efficient ventilation / heating / cooling, making sure safety elements are up to code.
In terms of mobility, I would not recommend moving a container home that has been substantially modified unless it’s been upgraded for exactly that. They can only be safely moved using the corners to distribute the weight, hence the special container arms at shipping yards that grab the corners. If you put a custom roof on there or otherwise make it so you can’t grab those corners, there’s a good chance the whole thing falls apart unless you’ve reinforced it to be mobile using yet more investment.
This is Sears all over again. You used to be able to order a house from a catalog.
They would basically ship you everything you needed to build the house, with some plans, and that was it. Bearing in mind that was a very long time ago.
Then all houses were built by professionals and prices rose. Houses got better overall, since someone who knew WTF they’re doing, put it all together.
Now, they won’t even go to where you want the house. Just building the houses for you in some house factory or something and they ship it to you pre-built.
This is just a trailer home without the wheels! What the actual hell.
Don’t get me wrong, mobile and trailer homes can be rather nice, but having no wheels… I dunno man, I think we’re moving backwards.
You don’t have to steel it. It’s a virtual picture. You can download it and share it with everyone, as often as you like, whenever you want. There’s no cost attached in sharing data other than hardware and energy
A lot of the ideas presented on this thread are less applications for federation and more applications for blockchain of some kind. For example, wikipedia or uber eats replacement. Before you blindly downvote me for this suggestion, let me explain why.
In federation, you have servers which talk to each other. Users own their own accounts and there are multiple repositories of information. Lemmy is a repository of links and comments, each lemmy instance has its own repository. Mastodon is a repository of tweets, replies, and DMs. This works great. Everybody makes their own repository of information, and users can subscribe to any repository they like. They can also, via federation, access other repositories and “pull” or “push” data to them. That last sentence is the magic of federation you don’t get on platforms like Facebook. ActivityPub and federated platforms solve this problem of provider lock-in, at least partially.
This fediverse is not great when you need to establish a single repository of information that everybody in the network uses and is in sync for all users. Because it has no mechanism to arrive at consensus as to what should go into that authoritative repository. Even if all participants can be relied to act honorably (something the internet rarely provides), there will be disagreements about what should go into that repository. Edits may come in at different times, how do we resolve which edit goes “first”? Because it may make the second edit irrelevant, etc. Federation can’t solve this problem. ActivityPub can’t solve it and Nostr can’t solve it. But…
This is the exact problem blockchains solve: how can you establish a centralized repository of information (ledger) and administer it in a decentralized, P2P way where you can’t trust all participants to honestly participate? You cannot develop P2P systems which maintain a centralized repository of information without blockchain because no other P2P system has been able to solve this problem. There is no other mechanism of arriving at consensus and prevent sybil attacks.
Wikipedia? Centralized repository of information. Uber eats? Centralized repository of foods available, drivers, customers, and orders. eBay? same. And by the very nature of blockchains, they can also have an economic layer built into them which provides a means of exchange among participants. Useful for an eBay replacement, maybe less useful for a wikipedia replacement. Those means of exchange (“tokens”) can be used not just for transfer of funds, but also for things like building/scoring user reputation and incentivizing specific behaviors, especially if you want to incentivize behavior that is contrary to a user’s normal economic interest, such as providing a subsidy for restaurants on Uber who use more expensive, but more sustainable food packaging.
The non-P2P solution is to trust the administration of this centralized repository to a trusted authority. We trust wikipedia to administer articles and decide what ultimately goes in them. That system works fine for wikipedia, I’m not convinced we need a decentralized version.
There are many blockchains with various technical attributes which may work better or worse for solving these problems. They may use proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, etc. Some are more decentralized than others and have features like censorship resistance, privacy, smart contract, etc. But they solve this exact problem.
Isn’t the point of blockchain that it’s immutable? What about people who want to delete their own stuff? Or even mods or admins that have to delete stuff for legal reasons?
Immutability is not bad, there are some situations you want immutability. For example, to secure voting systems, you may want to be able to write on the chain that “precinct 156 reported votes x/y/z in this quantity” so that if anybody comes along and tampers with those numbers later on, you can point to the chain and say “no see, actually, these are the real original numbers that the precinct published”. The precinct could lie about their numbers of course and publish bad numbers to the chain, blockchain doesn’t protect against that (unless the votes themselves are recorded on the chain by the individual voter), but the blockchain protects against those numbers changing in the future or another party incorrectly claiming they are a/b/c when they are actually x/y/z. That’s a situation where immutability helps. Same with financial transactions. If you sent somebody money, you want a record of that (a receipt) if they later claim you never sent it to them. Examples of records which have a high degree of immutability that people use in everyday life are: court records, census data, house deeds, etc.
Blockchains usually have some degree of immutability but from a technical perspective they don’t necessarily have to. If we’re talking about data storage, you don’t have to store the data itself on the chain, the chain data can just “point to” off-chain data which you can take down or modify at will.
An example of a scenario where this could work is: you have a blockchain for coordinating the sharing of medical information between different parties. You, as a user, have an account on this blockchain. The only data stored on chain is a list of parties and who you have authorized to receive your medical data along with a pointer to a file storage system like Amazon AWS which contains your medical data in encrypted format. You can add or revoke authorization at any time by changing how that data is encrypted. Whoever you gave authorization to prior may have made a copy of the data at that point in time, but you can block them from accessing new data you put out. When Amazon AWS gets a request to transfer a copy of your data to a new party, they can check the blockchain to see if that party is authorized to receive it.
The benefit of such a system would be that:
Your medical records are yours and stored in your own data storage system over which you have complete control.
You can choose to share it with parties like insurance providers or researchers who need large medical data sets to comb through.
You could set this control at a very granular level or grant access to all your data.
Your data becomes portable between insurance providers and your insurance provider can’t make your life difficult by refusing to export data to your new one.
That’s useful for “real life” data, so to speak, stuff that should be immutable, save for a few occasions, like correcting errors; but my question was geared towards internet content. Taking your example of Wikipedia, if the service suffers from a wave of trolls, as it exists today, it can roll back the changes. With a blockchain? That’s significantly harder, especially if useful edits happened in the meantime.
There’s also this problem:
you don’t have to store the data itself on the chain, the chain data can just “point to” off-chain data which you can take down or modify at will.
Supposing this Wiki doesn’t store any of the content, then the endpoints become the targets, which beats the whole purpose of the blockchain resilience/immutability. An endpoint that can’t be reached is useless, one that has been compromised is even worse. You can trust the blockchain, but not the endpoint. And if the endpoint is where the “real stuff” is at anyway, why even bother with a blockchain?
Taking your example of Wikipedia, if the service suffers from a wave of trolls, as it exists today, it can roll back the changes. With a blockchain? That’s significantly harder, especially if useful edits happened in the meantime.
I’m not convinced we need a Wikipedia that runs on blockchain, but for the sake of it being an interesting question, I’ll answer it. Firstly, having a revision history is not bad. If you go to any wikipedia page, you can see most of the edits made, even those made by trolls, and the moderation decisions around those edits. This is good for transparency. When a user visits wikipedia, they see the “authoritative version” of that page, but the revision history is available to them if they want to read it. So with blockchain, you can roll back changes by changing which set of data is the “authoritative version” and you can have revision history, they are both important features.
There are a few types of data that are so harmful we can’t have them, even in the revision history. For this kind of problem, we reduce immutability (as referenced before by using pointers instead of storing data on-chain), or we can prevent that data from being put into the chain in the first place. An example of a way to do this is to require that every new block (every revision to a wikipedia page) be approved by a set of users who have reputation >x. Maybe that means a moderator has to sign off, or 10 regular users with at least one approved edit, you can set the threshold however you like and assign reputation however you’d like. As a user’s reputation is recorded on the blockchain, any node can easily verify their reputation amount.
Supposing this Wiki doesn’t store any of the content, then the endpoints become the targets, which beats the whole purpose of the blockchain resilience/immutability. An endpoint that can’t be reached is useless, one that has been compromised is even worse. You can trust the blockchain, but not the endpoint. And if the endpoint is where the “real stuff” is at anyway, why even bother with a blockchain?
The purpose of the blockchain in this wikipedia example is to:
Establish a single authoritative version of wikipedia that the entire globe can see and submit edits to (unlike a federated version where you have multiple versions of wikipedia hosted different places). This is “single authoritative copy administered by people you can’t trust to be good actors” is the essential problem blockchain solves.
Censorship resistance or resistance to “attackers” may not be an important thing for a wikipedia clone. Resistance to attack depends on your threat model, who the attackers are, what kind of resources they have, how you can resist those attacks, etc. Right now, Wikipedia is a single centralized entity and has done quite a good job at resisting attacks aimed to force them to make editorial decisions they don’t want to (mostly because of their reliance on the protections provided by the US legal system. If that system collapsed for some reason, their attack resistance might drop significantly). So if we clone wikipedia and make it decentralized, I think one could increase that security, but I’m not convinced that’s needed in the first place.
It doesn’t matter if the data is ultimately stored at some endpoint, the blockchain is less about storage of data and more about arranging the data in order and establishing a single authoritative copy. It’s the medium through with users administer the data.
“You can’t trust the endpoint”, this is true but maybe not in a way that matters. It’s true that the endpoint can send you bad information, but you can verify if the information is good or bad based on a cryptographic hash from the blockchain. Endpoints can have a reputational score on-chain and if they aren’t doing their job properly, they can cease being used as an endpoint at all. There could be multiple endpoints for any given piece of data for redundancy and to protect against a scenario where an end point, maliciously or not, becomes unreliable. Also, there are decentralized data storage options out there with varying degrees of usefulness for this application: torrents, IPFS, Filecoin, jstor, etc.
Whether it’s impossible is up for debate. Deleting your data from any social media or google-like platform is pretty much impossible. Deleting your old blogger that hasn’t been archived in any manner, perfectly doable.
There’s also the blatantly illegal stuff that is removed from the wider net whenever it’s found, like child abuse stuff. Imagine that kind of thing being available “forever” in a blockchain.
I meant in the sense that if someone got a copy while it was up, then it’s not really gone. Even if the statists try to exterminate all copies, they will probably fail.
After all, even the pirate bay is still reachable in the clearnet. There is stilln a long way to go before they can really stamp out thoughtcrime.
I am anti oppressors and warcryers, sympathic to defenders, protectors and the dead. sometimes who the oppressor charges. I know asking doesn’t help but like please everyone stop killing eachother…
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