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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we’re still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.

    Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.

    The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn’t realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn’t necessarily want it to.

    Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn’t know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.

    It’s like when you’re trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.


  • I would describe it as a cacaphonic symphony that you eventually get used to. It packs as much information into one sense as you can get from your other four put together.

    Much like how you can discern an individual instrument type in a symphony, sight lets you discern individual objects from afar, and gives you a mostly accurate summary of its basic properties.

    Also much like with sound, it can be very appealing or unappealing, depending. There’s an intrinsic beauty to the sense itself though. Every object has color, for instance, and color is more like smell. It can give you hints about what something is, but its mostly an arbitrary blend of different “flavors” that combine to create more complex examples.

    It’s the super-sense, the one sense that binds them all. When one of your other four detects something, your first instinct is to locate it with sight to determine more information before you do anything else. You “look at it” first. Almost without fail.










  • I do not believe that the Fediverse is an exclusively anti-corporate platform. It’s nature is open to all, even corporations, at a technical level.

    Granted, many anti-corporate people came here, but that doesn’t make this a fundamently anti-corporate place. Just their specific communities.

    I also doubt many serious Fediverse types are that petty and childish. That’s generally a trait of more short-sighted people. Not a lot of native trolls here, we came here in many cases to escape that behavior.

    Is it so strange to think some assholes might just chase us down and bring it to us? What would you do if you were a hate-fueled asshole that wanted to watch the world burn? I’d find nice things and fuck them up, personally. That would be both fun and potentially effective.


  • LLMs. Despite how absurdly useful they are, I can recall a time when I had the skills of remembering phone numbers naturally and being able to easily navigate with no maps of any kind.

    These skills have deteriorated significantly in the past 10 years, and they’re not the only ones. The common thread they all have is my smartphone replaced them.

    I fear losing a skill that is less innocuous, from the new tech effectively replacing my need to practice it.


  • We’re having fun and trying to build a positive space. And we have real potential to succeed in growing large. Can you think of a single faster way to attract trolling on the internet?

    It’s a lot more likely than someone like spez taking a break from plundering his company to piss off a modest number of internet randos in some internet corner somewhere, which would barely be a drop in the bucket of his problem anyway.

    The overall effect of this is so small, it almost has to be someone(s) with too much time on their hands. If they had any kind of real power, they wouldn’t be wasting their time on these chump change attacks.