There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

PumpkinSkink

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

PumpkinSkink ,

Because it’s slightly tricky to replace the post master general: federaltimes.com/…/can-biden-fire-us-postmaster-g…

PumpkinSkink ,

Are we sure it’s cheaper though? I mean it legitimatly might not be. I have some friends who work in tech and they use an AI model for, amongst other things, summarizing information on their internal documentation. They’ve told me what their company is paying for the license to use this thing, and it’s eyewatering. also, uhh last time I checked, the company they got that license from does not turn a profit… so it appears to be too cheap at the moment.

It might really be the case that it isn’t cheaper than just paying someone a normal salary to do that work, and it probably isn’t cheaper than just jamming the work being done by the AI now back onto preexisting employees (which is what they did before ~2 years ago anyway).

The other thing that makes me feel this might not be unreasonable is that everyone on the team likes the tool, except their manager, who has thrown out the idea to cut it twice now (that I know of).

PumpkinSkink ,

Yeah, but because our government views technological dominance as a National Security issue we can be sure that this will come to nothing bc China Bad™.

What duration of time do you connect to intellectual property?

It’s one thing that copyright/IP is such a matter of debate in the creative world, but a whole new layer is added onto that when people say that it only matters for a certain amount of time. You may have read all those articles a few months ago, the same ones telling us about how Mickey Mouse (technically Steamboat Willy) is...

PumpkinSkink ,

Who does IP serve? It seems to me it serves very wealthy people who have the legal means to protect it. With that in mind, I think we should just get rid of it.

PumpkinSkink ,

Is he fondling the grunt’s junk?

PumpkinSkink ,

Low Quality Facts, the account that made this has a lot of these kinds of made up quotes. mstdn.social/

Bugs, mold and mildew found in Boar's Head plant linked to deadly listeria outbreak (www.cbsnews.com)

The article states that these horrendous, disgusting infractions of health regulations have been documented out for at least the previous year, but given their severity, I’d imagine it’s always been this way at Boar’s Head production facilities....

PumpkinSkink ,

Damn. And these bitches are charging me 12 dollars a lb for ham?

PumpkinSkink ,

Hey! It’s the part where the “centrists” betray the left and cede power to the facists! Damn. You’d think someone would write a new script or something.

Big Pharma claims lower prices will mean giving up miracle medications. Ignore them. (www.vox.com)

It is a harrowing proposition: that in trying to control drug prices for 67 million Medicare patients now, we might inadvertently prevent the development of future drugs that could save lives. Implied, if not stated outright, is that we’re putting a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s or some other intractable disease in...

PumpkinSkink ,

Even if they’re right, that just means I won’t be able to afford those “Miracle Medications” anyway…

PumpkinSkink ,

Golf With Your Friends

PumpkinSkink ,

A US citizen who immigrated to Israel. Israel allows (nearly) anyone of Jewish heritage to immigrate (Link) , and so a lot of Israelis are of another nationality as well.

PumpkinSkink ,

I keep thinking about how Google has implemented it. It sums up my broader feelings pretty well. They jammed this half-baked “AI” product into the very fucking top of their search results. I can’t not see it there - its huge and takes up most of my phone’s screen after the search, but I always have to scroll down past it because it is wrong, like, pretty often, or misses important details. Even if it sounds right, because I’ve had it be wrong before I have to just check the other links anyway. All it has succeed at doing in practice is make me scroll down further before I get to my results (not unlike their ads, I might add). Like, if that’s “AI” it’s no fucking wonder people avoid it.

PumpkinSkink ,

Uhh there’s a paywall, but I’m gonna presume they said something to the effect of: “Pweze Impwemewnt IMF style-SAPs and privatize Petrobras. Pweze”.

PumpkinSkink ,

Ok, let’s say the ceasefire deal does exist and is “inside the 10-yard line”. Is it going to be another Camp David and kick the can down the road until we have another round of murder, or are there provisions about a international peacekeeping force and a credible path to Palestinian state hood?

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are surging "faster than ever" to beyond anything humans ever experienced, officials say (www.cbsnews.com)

One of the major drivers of the exceptional heat building within Earth’s atmosphere has reached levels beyond anything humans have ever experienced, officials announced on Thursday. Carbon dioxide, the gas that accounts for the majority of global warming caused by human activities, is accumulating “faster than ever,”...

PumpkinSkink ,

To solve the climate crisis the ~1 billion people in global north will absolutely need to significantly bail out the global South. There is no clear development path that doesn’t go through heavy fossil fuel usage, and it should go without saying we probably can’t even improve the living standard of another billion people, let alone seven billion without basically just giving them money and technology to skip the fossil fuel step. Countries in the global north have actually agreed to this framework, it’s just that noone has actually made good on the promise yet. So… not only is it not nonsense… it’s an active dispute between developed countries and developing countries.

PumpkinSkink ,

Says the guy who literally built a fucking pier to delivery food because Israel won’t let trucks go through on the road.

PumpkinSkink , (edited )

The fact is, however, that they impinge— as they always have— on the Arab residents of the territories, and then they have a distinct cutting edge to them. Both in theory and in practice their effectiveness lies in how they Judaize territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it. There is privileged evidence of this fact, I think, in what Joseph Weitz had to say. From 1932 on, Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund; in 1965 his diaries and papers, My Diary, and Letters to the Children, were published in Israel. On December 19, 1940, he wrote:

_“. . . after the Second World War the question of the land of Israel and the question of the Jews would be raised beyond the framework of “ development”; amongst ourselves. !t must be clear that there is no room for hoth peoples in this country. No ‘development’ will bring us closer to our aim. To be an independent people in this small country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide-open for us. And if the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable.


<span style="color:#323232;">When the War is over and the English have won, and when the judges sit on the throne of Law, our people must bring theirpetitions and their claim before them; and the only solution is Eretz Israel, or at least Western Eretz Israel, without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point! The Zionist enterprise so far, in terms of preparing the ground and paving the way for the creation of the Hebrew State in the land of Israel, has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘‘land-buying ’— but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all: except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a singlevillage, not a single tribe. And the transfer must be directed to Iraq, to Syria, and even to Transjordan. For that purpose we’ll find money, and a lot of money. And only with such a transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers, and the Jewish question shall be solved, once and for all. There is no other way out."_
</span>

These are not only prophetic remarks about what was going to happen; they are also policy statements, in which Weitz spoke with the voice of the Zionist consensus. There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists, beginning with Herzl. and when ‘salvation’ came it was with those ideas in mind that the conquest of Palestine, and the eviction of its Arabs, was carried out.

~The Question of Palestine, Edward Said

There’s literally dozens of other quotes like this one from people instrumental in the founding of Israel in this chapter, and they are similarly genocidal. It was honestly pretty transparent what they were going for.

PumpkinSkink ,

Nominally pretty far from it. She’s part of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s (the current president of Mexico) Morena party.

PumpkinSkink ,

They probably just assume that because they don’t know the difference noone else does either lol. I was in shock for a moment “they gave Ukraine F-35s? The US okayed that? Can they even operate them?”

PumpkinSkink ,

Their solution will be “shoot migrants” not “solve climate change”.

PumpkinSkink ,

The alternative would be helping those countries most affected to prevent migrations from happening. In practice, that would look like giving them [Shitloads] of (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8694300/) money .

Like, regardless of ethics, those people will not stop existing once climate change makes their homelands unlivable. The two available plans appear to be “solve climate change as rapidly as possible and bootstrap poor countries up to developed countries pro Bono” or “shoot migrants at the border”.

PumpkinSkink ,

Noone is saying that. The argument is pretty much that people want more scrutiny applied to other companies beyond tiktok, and ideally not be under constant surveillance by any of them, not that people want to be monitored by all police states equally.

PumpkinSkink ,

No. Not at all. If I remember correctly, Guyana has a ~2500 person military. But it’s still weird because even though Venezuela has a more capable military and shares a border with Guyana, it’s not clear how Venezuela would actually invade. There is no road from directly Venezuela to Guyana, the area their border is on is dense, sparsely populated forest. The only road between the two countries goes through Brazil, who has a real army, and has moved troops to the border, I think. The other option is an amphibious assault, but that’s sketchy too because amphibious assaults are notoriously hard and there’s a US (and I think UK) naval presences just off the coast. So, like, Guyana’s military can’t really defend itself, but it’s also unclear how Venezuela would actually prosecute an attack.

PumpkinSkink ,

I recently heard somewhere that the joke in India is that in western tech company’s “AI” stands for “Absent Indians”.

PumpkinSkink ,

it’d be a great place to grow some weed.

PumpkinSkink ,

Money is a means of determining the distribution of resources. It doesn’t matter if stuff costs less or if people make more money, what matters is that nessecities, at a minimum, are more equitably distributed. You can make that end goal take different forms. Money is a little awkward for that end because you use money to purchase both food and nice cars.

PumpkinSkink ,

This reminds me of that time. England and Iceland went to “war” over fishing rights in the 70s and just, like, cut fishing nets and rammed each other’s boats

PumpkinSkink ,

Careful. You’re saying the quiet part outloud.

PumpkinSkink ,

It stands out to me how they make a specific goal on increasing renewable capacity but make no such goals to reduce fossil fuel production. My concern is that if we don’t consciously do the latter, the extra renewable capacity will, in effect, be used to increase power output without reducing the absolute quantity of fossil fuels significantly. There’s a lot of capital wrapped up in fossil fuel extraction, and we would be asking a lot of very power entities to take a haircut on their RoI by not continuing to use it. I think it’s a non-trivial problem that is really not being taken seriously enough in these kinds of talks.

PumpkinSkink ,

I mean, I can agree that simple autocatalytic reactions can occur with chemistry based on other elements… but it’s a stretch to say that suggests “alien life might not be carbon-based”. Maybe very, very simple, life-like chemical systems, but life as we know it is defined by large, many-atom molecules, and no other element can do this the the way carbon can (not even silicon, whose bond energy decreases with catentation of more silicon atoms link, which, combined with it’s poor ability to form multiple bonds ruins the possibility of silicon-based life). Anything that we can conceivably think of as “life” beyond simple self-reproducing chemical, or bizzare Boltzmann brain-esque systems will have carbon-based chemicals in it.

PumpkinSkink ,

There’s good reason to presume carbon is required. Carbon has some nice, and totally unique properties that allow it to facilitate life.

The most important features to carbon in this context are:

  1. Stable catenation of atoms. Carbon atoms can bond to other carbon atoms in a long chain, and that chain does not become appreciably more reactive. This allows for the construction of very large molecules with specialized mechanical functions.
  2. Ability to form stable multiple bonds. Carbon can form single, double, or triple bonds with itself (and oxygen and nitrogen), which allows carbon-based molecules to have ridgid shapes. Double bonds are found all over the place in life because they allow molecules to have sections that aren’t just wiggly noodles of atoms.
  3. Bond stabilities that fall in a kind of “goldilocks zone” where carbon bonds to other atoms are strong enough to resist falling apart, but weak enough to be broken later.
  4. Nearly identical electronegativity to hydrogen. Carbon pulls on the electrons in its bonds about the same amount as hydrogen. This allows it to make stable bonds that are non-polar, which, when used in conjuction with other, more electronegative atoms (particularly oxygen and phosphorus) allow Carbon-containing molecules to be hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or both simultaneously. This property is what allows for complex structures like Lipid bilayers and proteins to be formed.

No other atom, not even silicon, has this set of properties, and it’s very hard to imagine how you would make all but the most simplistic verson of life without these.

PumpkinSkink ,

I have similar suspicions, but my great concern is that, at that point, the solution that many countries will come to will be to start shoot migrants at the border rather than to actually do anything to mitigate the root cause of the migrations.

How many ingredients does it take to call it a salad?

My significant other ate cucumbers and onion with some ranch. I called it a cucumber onion salad. She says there aren’t enough ingredients to call it a salad, because “it takes multiple ingredients”. I pointed out she had three and asked what the minimum is. She refuses to answer so I ask Lemmy.

PumpkinSkink ,

If i chop up a cucumber and throw it in a bowl with some vinegarette, I call it a cucumber salad.

PumpkinSkink ,

I’m not your boss. Do it up, man.

PumpkinSkink ,

tomato, tomatoe. Not that I’d ever put tomatoes in a cucumber salad. That’s heathen shit.

What to play after experiencing Chrono Trigger?

Left feeling a bit empty after playing it for the first time a few months ago(why did I wait so long?) I am afraid no JRPG will be able to surpass it. Would love to have a discussion about similar games that reach the same quality level (Note: I have already played Final Fantasy VI ).

PumpkinSkink ,

I’m kinda surprised how few people have mentioned Chrono Cross. It’s not the same game, but it has a lot of cross over, and might help scratch that itch for “more chronotrigger”.

Japan: Can anything be done to stop population decline? (www.dw.com)

The latest numbers on Japanese population make for a dismal reading — the number of people who died in 2022 (1.56 million) was roughly twice as big as the number of newborn children (771,000). Based on residency registrations, the country’s Internal Ministry estimates a total population loss of some 800,000 last year. This...

PumpkinSkink ,

I mean realistically the most obvious thing to me is that something has to be done to make the prospect of having children less daunting. I can’t speak to Japan, but for my friends here, in our early 30s, we’re only just now getting to a place where moving out of our parents/a 5 person roommate situation is feasible. Many of us don’t have long-term romantic prospects, and work all the fucking time. Ok top of that, having a kid just sounds terrifying. The cost, and amount of effort needed to see a kid not have a terrible life is daunting (I’m a teacher. Just imaging the amount of effort I, as a parent, would need to put in to have a average kid succeed in a school environment is horrifying)

I imagine a real intervention for this sort of thing looks like less work; good, free child care; our cities building culturally relevant community spaces that people actually want to go to outside of the internet; and creating a culture of community-oriented sharing of the responsibilities of caring for children. In short, we’d need to make our society one that’s less hostile to having kids. That seems pretty obvious, and from my understanding, a lot of these factors are worse in Japan than in the US.

PumpkinSkink ,

When toxic “econimistism” comes home to roost. A “strong economy” as measured by stock markets and company profits, both owned primarily by the extremely wealthy is not the same as “working class people are doing well economically”, which is what should be meant by “a strong economy” if it were not for the neoliberal brain rot.

PumpkinSkink , (edited )

Not a historian, nor Italian, so double check me on this, but a big part of the “why” is that the facists were never removed from Italy. They’ve just been kind of allowed to fester since 1946. I mean, Germany didn’t really get rid of their facists either, but the Italian facist movement was basically unscathed. Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) was founded in 1946 by Facists literally from Mussolini’s party, and maintained relevance by making political alliances with other, more moderate conservative parties.

Some facists just straight up joined the Liberal parties. Fernando Tambroni, Christian Democratic Prime Minister of Italy for 116 days in 1960, for instance, was a Facist Party member during the war, and was quite the fan of Mussolini. The subsequent Prime Minister, Christian Democrat Party leader, Amintore Fanfani, who served five non-consecutive terms as PM, was also a member of the Facist Party.

In the 90s other facist parties, particularly Forza Italia, and Alleanza Nazionale were spun off from MSI and basically wore a better better mask, and managed to get Berlusconi, also a Mussolini Stan, in as PM.

We could continue doing pointing out facists in powerful positions in Italian politics, and we skipped the whole “decades of facist terrorism” thing, but really the reason Italy jumped to fascism is because it has been there the whole time, and has had power semi-regularly.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •