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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • People are afraid of radiation because you can’t see or smell or hear it. Which is probably a good thing considering you are surrounded by it all the time.

    People: “I’m going to enjoy this sunny day with my shirt off and no sunscreen”

    Same people: “I don’t want a nuclear plant anywhere in my country.”

    Also fun are the 5G haters who don’t realize that 5G is being delivered over 3.4 ghz to 4.2 ghz but they’re ok with the wireless home phones doing 2.4ghz. Also fun fact for those who don’t know but you can actually destroy cellular tissue with ultrasound if the amplitude is high enough. Of course the range for this is very short and ultrasonic imagers don’t have the power to do this but ultimately this can be summarized as “everything is dangerous if you use enough of it” which just seems obvious and shouldn’t need to be mentioned.




  • Oh my favourite are the environmentalists pushing for EVs as if replacing an existing car with an EV is somehow greener. It’s good to push new sales to EVs but it’s bad to get people to drop still functioning cars for an EV. Then there is the power grid issue which is going to be a minor social and economic disaster at this point because seemingly no one is ready for it.

    Before some knob assumes anything this is not a pro-ICE comment and I actually own an EV, this is someone urging society to think actions through before committing to them. A lot of unintended consequences have come of the various steps done to push EVs.

    Ideally we work to remove the need to own a vehicle in the first place.



  • Unfortunately some people do not want to acknowledge that our large businesses are downright evil. For those who doubt this, consider the pharmaceutical companies that raised insulin prices up to hundreds of dollars a month. They did not give a single shit that people would die, so long as they increased profit from their captive audience. If big business doesn’t even care whether you live or die, why would they care about the much smaller stakes involved in the federated ActivityPub space?


  • Will Meta embrace-extend-extinguish the ActivityPub protocol? There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

    That is a stunning display of naïveté.




  • Imagine it’s post-2001 and George Bush is saying we need to take away Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). You hear there is a controversy around this topic, so you look it up on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article may not even mention the controversy because it came from “fringe sources” or unreliable media, instead its rules mean they only share the message from approved media sources, and that means the article says Iraq definitely has WMDs and something must be done.

    This is how it works now, and always had.

    When I was in college in the second half of the 2000s, we were banned from using Wikipedia as a source due to the way it is built. Many complained but given how many controversies Wikipedia has found itself involved in which includes paid editors, state actors, only being able to use biased journalistic coverage to construct articles, refusing to use other media sources such as established bloggers…

    Trusting Wikipedia at any point was the mistake. It’s not even the Wikimedia foundation that is the issue, it’s the structure of the site. If no approved journalists will speak the truth, your article will be nothing but lies and Wikipedia editors will dutifully write those lies down and lock down the article if you attempt to correct them using sources they personally dislike.