Hypervigilant supertaster and bibliophile. I am not a bot! I am a human being!

  • 5 Posts
  • 115 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I’m in the same place without having read that piece you mentioned. And I’m not going to be looking it up.

    As I see it, climate change is the greatest threat the human race has ever faced. It makes World War II look like a squabble in a kindergarten playground. We should all be INCREDIBLY impacted by this, and yet everyone keeps going on as if nothing is happening.

    But I think 50 years is a little bit of a narrow time frame. More likely we’ll all die within 100 to 150 years. I mean, our species will go extinct.

    Lately I’ve been thinking about what a sane society would do to try to mitigate the worst effect of climate change, while preparing society for the world that’s coming. A world without fossil fuels or basic infrastructure.




  • Wouldn’t e-bikes be a relatively stopgap measure? They still require a relatively advanced and carbon-wasteful technological base, after all: maintenance and repair for the bikes themselves (including regular replacement batteries, which are definitely NOT environmentally friendly), plus paved roads in good repair (again, requiring a lot of fossil fuel expenditure).

    There’s also the likelihood that as the Earth’s environment becomes increasingly hazardous we’ll require protection from the elements more and more often - protection which would be difficult to add to a bike of any sort.

    The US military has projected that basic infrastructure in the USA will be collapsing throughout much of the country in less than twenty years. It’s hard to see how ebikes will be practical under those conditions. Gearing towards long-term lower-tech solutions would seem to be a wiser choice.




  • It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

    I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.






  • Would different parts of the community be hosted on different instances, thereby spreading out the burden? Or would the entire community be mirrored to each of the hosting instances, thereby providing backup security?

    I’ve actually been wondering about that. For example, what if an instance with a popular community went down or defederated from everyone? Would all the content of that community be lost to everyone else? I’m guessing that under those circumstances one or more new communities would be started to replace the “lost” community, although things could get complicated if there were more than one trying to replace the original - or if the original community refederated after the replacement communities developed.






  • So what? We’ll create one!

    Years ago the owners of GoodReads announced that Amazon had taken away their access to the Amazon book database. It was an existential threat, they said, and asked the GoodReads community to volunteer to create a new book database to replace Amazon’s. Hundreds or thousands of us worked for free, donating thousands or tens of thousands of hours to the project.

    And then GoodReads announced that they’d sold out to Amazon. Apparently they’d been in negotiations with those bastards the whole time they were lying to us about losing access to the database. Maybe proving that they could sucker their loyal users into donating free labor helped raise the selling price of GoodReads a little.

    As for the database we created, I guess it’s Amazon’s now. Of course, if we create a movie database of our own, NOBODY will be able to buy it! And we can make it available for free use, if we want.