Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

Hello again,

I've been out of the fediverse due to technical reasons with the server I was previously (castilla.social) and wanting to leave the social media for some time.

Now, I'm back at a server, which I hope it ends up being more stable in the long term.

My interests are:
- Software development, with particular interests in #Prolog, #Emacs and #Rust
- History about all periods, although my favorite topics are contemporary and pre-Roman cultures.
- I'm learning #Chinese. I'm still a newbie, so don't expect a lot.
- Bikes (I usually post photos with my trips), trains, planes and also cars
- Videogames. I've grown up with games like SimCity, OpenTTD and similar. I also enjoy racing games and some action games are fine too.

I also have a website and a blog (mostly in Spanish): https://adrianistan.eu and https://blog.adrianistan.eu

@YakyuNightOwl @CptSuperlative currently reading this. It tells a very different story from the Hollywood version as well. A lot of unnecessary sacrifice, mass murder, desperate attempts to hold on to colonial interests and practically zero concern for local or indigenous populations. And that's just the allies. For me, Palestine and the Middle East show that none of the above has gone away when it comes to the morality of the US, Germany and most of the West and they're about to do it again.

@peterbrown @gerrymcgovern @jgkoomey Hard to see a system that celebrates the acceleration of the destruction of our own habitat as anything but a death cult.

@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.

@prestontumber @OhWeh @gerrymcgovern

It’s millennial. Most civilizations’ agricultural and pastoral practices deplete and erode soil along with the landscape atop it.

Rome, Greece destroyed their soils. Soil determines the longevity of a civilization. The UK did not fall because it forced Ireland to feed it, after it destroyed its own agricultural productivity.

We know it as the potato famine.

Soil depletion and erosion is central to land consolidation and wars.

@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

every time i see the internet without an ad blocker applied i’m shocked at what people are just supposed to put up with. i honestly don’t think i could

@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.

How people think AI is going to kill them: terminator robots.

How AI is actually going to kill them: by destroying their habitat and drinking all their water.

@aral Well, taking into account that billionaires usually don't have their money in cash to lose it to inflation but in real state or other property... and that cash can be moved out of the EU very easily (while still being able to use it) while property is hard and real state is impossible...

I think is much more effective to tax property. And property is already taxed.

Not to talk about that there isn't a centralized european tax office.

ocaml is nice but I still kinda miss lisp sexp soup... I must be insane

@FantasticalEconomics @Simon318ppm
In his book, "Macroeconomics Without Growth", Steffen Lange identified doing away with the "sales function" as one of the policies needed for a steady state economy.
My review: https://steadystatemanchester.net/2018/11/09/an-economy-that-does-not-grow/
#degrowth