Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @prestontumber @OhWeh @gerrymcgovern

If by "civilization" you mean states (as in all the examples you gave), then perhaps so.

If you mean human society, then no.

A lot of early agriculture was done in flood plains where nutrients were regularly replenished by natural systems. Different cultures found many ways to do agriculture sustainably. Many shifted back and forth seasonally between farming and hunting/foraging.

We're just lately learning astounding things about the ancient Amazon: there were far more people and vast, complex infrastructure, than we ever realized. They had ways of creating amazingly fertile soil that we don't even understand yet.

In North America, European settlers found intricately maintained environments that supported both humans and biodiversity in sustainable ways. They did not discover a continent laid to waste by agriculture.

@gerrymcgovern I suspect that water would be more efficiently used if they poured it right on to the servers in the picture.

@kenshirriff Very interesting graph that of course raises more questions. :) I am glad you didn’t use a logarithmic scale. Do you have the data to easily create a similar graph zooming in on the 0-500 million pixel to the full width of the graph? Again, not logarithmic?

@kenshirriff

Is that why TFG thinks he's "one of the working people, fighting the elites"? 😅

my favorite computer thing is when i copy something and then i paste it somewhere and it pastes something old or nothing

Noting the use of the word 'evacuees' for people fleeing Florida. Perhaps we could use the same word for folks fleeing climate induced extreme weather and its societal consequences on other continents.

I love this take:

"Don't you find it infuriating when lawyers and accountants fail to clarify how their respective domains work, making them unavoidable intermediaries of systems that in theory you should be able to navigate by yourself?

Whenever we fail to make simple things easy in software engineering, and webdev especially, we are failing society in the exact same way."

from https://kristoff.it/blog/static-site-paradox/

I think my plan to achieve Japanese literacy *is* working even though it feels like failure to exercise a level of patience, commitment, and endurance far beyond anything I've ever attempted before in my life.
毎日もう頑張ります。

@gerrymcgovern I love this whole AI debate thing. It uncovers all the idiots who have no idea what they are talking about and just parrot what any techbro says about their tech. It's true that ML can help us slove many different problems. But LLMs aren't it. People calling all ML things "AI" doesn't help either. 😐 Gives the grifters a false appearance of legitimacy.

> fed says no money for hurricanes after spending 1.4 billion on immigrants

how about no money for taxes

@FelisCatus @gerrymcgovern On a long enough timeline coal is renewable too.

This is not the first time I’ve said that the term “renewable” is meaningless in terms of low-pollution or low-carbon energy and it won’t be the last.