And thus the political compass came to be, deciding that one axis on a sliding scale wasn’t enough to capture the nuances of political ideologies, but two axes was plenty!

I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.

Aren’t there still massive issues with the Colorado River running dry? Hopefully they’re not too dependant on that water source for their chips

I think they’ll get away with it because they’re deliberately marketing it the way so many similar movies are managed: formulaically for kids, but with some actors and writing meant to give ‘the adults’ something to watch too. Unfortunately, ‘the adults’ are almost always assumed to have only a passing familiarity with the subject material, and I have a feeling they’re going to write the ‘for the adults in the room’ jokes with that assumption in mind.

It feels like it’s being written on an outdated manual, ignoring the fact that there’s a very sizable core audience of 20 and 30-somethings they could tap into. My guess is that everything they tried only tested well with children in focus groups, since apparently they were dead-set on a live-action format from the very beginning. I hate to be so cynical, but it’s possible they decided to go all-in on kids because they can hit the appeal without worrying as much on the production standards.

Driving is more fun when there are more viable alternatives. I don’t like driving, but it’s my only real choice where I live so I do it begrudgingly, and you have to share the road with me. Think of all the people who don’t want to drive (on account of it being dangerous, costly and/or mentally taxing) suddenly not being in cars, and how much traffic that would free up for you to zip around instead!

Also, calling a public service “bankrupt” is really weird to me. How many tax dollars are we spending on public highways and freeways again? Do suburbs, which are designed to be car-dependent, provide a net gain or net cost in tax revenue to cities?

In principle, I get the idea: that you can’t have someone else steal something for you and then get off the hook because you weren’t the one who stole it. That said, I feel like the laws should be written in a way that precludes someone being charged with both for the same offense, or in a way that delegates the fault such that “taking” and “receiving” add up to the consequences of a single theft charge.

Of course, the US is a Prison State so it’s unlikely one wasn’t added simply to pad out sentence lengths or leverage plea deals.

What if it is getting ripped/torn but there’s just more space ‘underneath’ that instantly fills the gaps as they are created? I guess at that point it’s indistinguishable from stretching but it’s interesting to think about

Why not just put up a Moonlight Tower?

The Inuit/Eskimos are some of the more self-sustaining peoples on the planet. They don’t depend much on imports from elsewhere, at least not to my knowledge. They had to figure out many adaptations for the area but they make it work and have done so for a long time.

To compare them with a city representing the pinnacle of mankind’s hubris is a bit of a reach imo

Wow, please tell me you’re trolling

Local police also aren’t generally the best to contact over federal offenses. If it’s not immediately actionable, they tend to lose interest and just shove the paperwork onto the “when we get around to it” pile

tl;dr the signal appears to have been from a cold hydrogen cloud “resonating” off of radiation bursts; namely, those emitted by neutron stars. The stronger the burst through the cloud, the louder the signal on equipment. The WOW! signal appears to have been the result of a particularly powerful event, but by observing the same/similar (?) gas cloud(s), they’ve been able to spot signals with the same signature, albeit weaker due to being hit by less rare (and less powerful) phenomena.

Some clarification might be needed on whether it’s a specific cloud that produces this signal, or if any cold hydrogen clouds are capable of it. I couldn’t seem to find any in the article itself. Maybe there’s something in the published research paper that provides further information.

That’s really good to know, and not how I thought the system worked previously. I thought instances were responsible for all vote aggregation and simply reported totals to each other at regular intervals, plus submitting comments/edits from users which are more obviously public

Y’know, that’s fair. I think I misspoke, and meant to say that the admins of your instance can see your IP but not the admins of another (assuming you’re not self hosting on your home PC without a VPN), but I’m not 100% sure that’s true because I’ve never looked at the protocol.

If every interaction is already public on the backend/API level, then simply not showing the info to users is just a transparency issue.

The more I’m thinking about this, the more I believe it’s a cultural/expectations thing. On websites like Tumblr, all of your reblogs and likes are public info, but it’s very up front about that. Social media like Facebook, IG, and sites like Discord, it’s the same; you can look through the list of everyone who reacted.

Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it’s available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it’s possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?

I mean, that’s already true and why the federation model is used in the first place. If another instance can’t be trusted, you can disconnect your own from it (extremely easy if you self-host, if you are a standard member of a larger instance it might require convincing)

I’m pretty sure the traffic for the ads still gets sent to your device over the Internet, it’s just that the ad blocker keeps it from rendering in your browser.

And who’s responsible for keeping the different teams properly staffed and funded?

I linked it because I recall it having a lot of cogent points and being relevant, and because I don’t remember off the top of my head the specific allegations, I didn’t want to dig through a two hour video I’ve already seen at the exact moment of writing because I only had so much time and research to dedicate to a Lemmy comment. It’s valid to be annoyed by a long video linked as an argument, but my comment was a “too long didn’t watch” version of it… that actually left out some details like the founder also being a fucking eugenicist.

I also use an adblocker, and the vid has some opinions obviously but was mostly going over evidence, recordings, and related allegations.

You don’t have to watch it if you don’t want to. I linked it as a secondary source. While primary sources are preferable and it might have been a good idea to do the legwork myself, I wanted something posted quick to maybe make people think twice on the “donate to TST” call to action in the initial comment.

TST is not a super great org unfortunately. They do stuff for great headlines but apparently little in the way of effective advocacy. I’ve also heard that there are pretty bad issues with misogyny among the upper echelons. While it’s extremely long at 2hrs, Dead Domain’s video on the subject goes into great detail.

It’s really unfortunate, I wanted to believe they were fighting the good fight but I don’t know if I can in good conscience anymore