Haha, yeah the French totally do that.

I remember when I was a kid and my dad worked in the computer industry. He went to France for work somewhere around 1990. I remember he said that France likes to keep their language pure, not adopt English words, and in technology, where there were a lot of new words, they didn’t always have one for things. So for example, their word for “hard disk” translated literally to “spinning magnetic binary drive”. Whereas, the Japanese would say something along the lines of “harta disku”, which was at least more succinct.

Well that’s great and all, but what if that doesn’t happen? Would you rather be dead or living comfortably in a warmer climate?

Something like learning to make perfect custom designed edits to genes, such abilities could easily save hundreds of millions when the next major plague or crop blight hits. We’ll definitely find ways to make hardier crops, that can survive harsher climates. Who knows, we could get so good at it that we could afford to just strengthen every species we can find with genes to help them survive the rapidly changing world, at least for long enough for us to turn things around. Maybe we could design lichens or mosses that could grow on Mars, adding oxygen to the atmosphere. Maybe we could learn to do even more impactful things that I can’t even think of right now (since I’m not even a biologist).

And maybe, just maybe, genetics isn’t even the only field that could turn out to be extraordinarily important to survival in the future. Maybe we should continue to pursue every field of science and engineering… Because fucking obviously we should.

So why mammoths? Why not? Bringing back the mammoth is just a bit of problem solving, it’s an exercise with a tangible goal.

Would you rather call it “official” or “certified” or “genuine” toner cartridges? Because that sounds worse to me.

I mean, they really do need some way to differentiate their product from others. Because they do guarantee that their cartridge works with their printer (and customers would hold them accountable if they did not). They really can’t guarantee that with any others. (simply because they didn’t design the others, haven’t tested them, and have no power to change them if there was a problem. All of which is perfectly reasonable)

Meh, I think it’s pretty straight forward. It’s just a description of the scenario.

Mario games are first party content, because they’re made by the same company that makes the console. This says nothing positive or negative about the game, just who developed it.

I’ve used printers that don’t have cartridges, instead they just have ink wells you can fill with any ink. You do have more freedom with ink choices, but they’re a different kind of hassle. It’s not simply a better solution.

(Speaking of solutions, sometimes the ink you buy is more of a suspension than a solution, and it’ll clump up and dry in the feed hoses, a real pain in the ass.)

Oh man, I have bad news for you about living languages…

But no, I know what you mean, I don’t like it either.

But the thumbnail, isn’t that just the album cover from Nirvana’s Nevermind?

Is moderation difficult? What makes it difficult?

Oh my God, yes… So many things it’s hard to even consider how to answer…

What happens to the “spirit of discovery and genuine community” when moderation fails?

We have the Internet today. Because moderation has broken down everywhere, it has been defeated, engineered around.

Wow, I can’t believe this post has gotten so many down votes. It’s such a reasonable statement.

Probably the only thing in the whole post I could disagree with here is the word “understand”

AI can generate slop, but it can also understand, categorize, filter, moderate. It can also be slow to adapt to new attacks, or be analyzed and manipulated.

It comes down to this, maybe they can improve upon something. They’re talking about building something resistant to political trolling, hate speech, and misinformation. If they can do that, that would be valuable. I’m willing to wait and see.

I’m willing to wait and see, especially because Lemmy has no defense against that kind of thing. I think there’s probably less hate speech and misinformation on Lemmy than reddit right now, but if Lemmy became the dominating service, it would have massive problems, just like reddit.

I like the federation aspect of Lemmy, that feels extremely valuable, I’m not discounting that. But I think not being open to other options or ideas is plain stupid.

Yeah, as I recall they’re actually really important to the ecology of Madagascar. A native species of tree simply doesn’t grow without them. And without those trees, well you can imagine that affects a lot of things.

Are you not entertained?

I believe cod liver oil does have some benefits too. My understanding is that historically one of the primary uses was to stave off rickets, a childhood disease. This actually worked because the oil is high in vitamin D, the thing these kids actually needed.

I gather they were really popular back in the day…

If they want to be helpful they can work out how to engineer humans that can survive 40 degree heat and breathe co2.

That’s what they’re fucking doing by bringing back the mammoth…

They’ll run when they’re ready, but right now they’re learning to crawl. Or to put it differently, let them cook.

You’ll find that we have a lot of people on this planet, we can multitask. We can research genetic engineering, and green energy, and medical technology, and recycling processes, as well as things that don’t advance those immediate goals, like microprocessors, meta materials, superconductors, astrophysics, geology, mathematics, etc.

When your house will be burning for the next few hundred years and you still have to live in it because even on fire it’s the best house around, maybe just get on with your life and do something productive? Perhaps some of us can move out eventually, but it would take a lot of research in a lot of different fields, probably even genetics…

Can we just use our fcking resources for things that matter???

Yeah, bring back the passenger pigeon! We need more pigeons! Do something that’ll make a difference already!

Also, can we get some dodos up in here? Where all my dumb birds at?

Heh, and if you don’t believe that, ask a Texan.

Actually in retrospect, they really may not understand electrical grids…

Apple has a history of being the good guys when it comes to issues of encryption. As a rule, they want to keep your privacy (and theirs). But they also want to continue operating in many countries, and when something like this happens, they may fight it in court, but if they lose, they won’t pull out of the region, they’ll find a way to comply.

In other words, this is a problem with national governments. They need to stop asking app and os developers to do unethical things, there’s enough pressure for them to do that already.

And who knows maybe it also shuffles these developers down a slippery slope… Maybe developers figure “if we must spy on users, we’ve already lost their trust, we might as well make a profit from it”. And that leads us to the relationship we have with technology today, our tech is untrustworthy, we feel the oppression of the surveillance state and we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Yeah, the application kind of assumes a lot of industry though. I mean if there isn’t a lot of industry, what are you shipping off the moon? But still, 50 km of rail is a lot, but it’s far less than the 325,000 km of tether that a space elevator would need…

Spin launch would definitely be feasible for some cargo, theoretically it would be a bit easier in vacuum, though that would probably also present other challenges. However, with a reasonably sized spin launch system (like the size of a 4 story apartment building), the payload needs to handle forces around 3000 Gs (which is a lot even for cargo). Unfortunately, you’d need to go larger for lower G force. So this also requires a lot of industry.