Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

@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.

@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.

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

@gerrymcgovern

I like how he labels our predicament "modernity" instead of "capitalism" or "consumerism", sidestepping any possibility of imagined political "fixes".

#GNU was founded today in 1983 by Richard Stallman! 🐂🐃
https://www.gnu.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU
#CakeDay #GNU1983 #GNU41XXYO #RichardStallman #rms #OnThisDay

@mjg59 Dude paying 10$/month to the worlds richest man to have blue check on a website complains how unpaid volunteers don't fix the bugs he found fast enough.

What an amazing society we have.

the way our societies are heading WRT requiring all humans to carry portable telescreens running freedom-depriving software, it creates essentially two new artificial disabilities that should probably be contemplated in future issues of the paralympic games:
- those who refuse to carry such devices end up facing insurmountable accessibility barriers, and being denied essential and nonessential public and private services because of the artificial disability imposed on them, namely, missing an artificial appendage that, to ableist eyes, turn them into subhuman
- those who agree to carry them end up deprived of another invaluable and essential feature that humans have historically pursued, fought for and even died for. having their freedom taken away, they endure another artificial disability, that is horribly debilitating, but whose normalization is well underway despite its being a mostly invisible disability.
after this development, every person has become a person with disability, so the olympic and paralympic games are expected to merge