@BigShellEvent Clearly every modern polycule needs to have at least one cephalopod member, just as a practical matter.
Deadbolt locks were clearly not designed by humans; you need at least 4-5 hands to assemble one with any reasonable degree of grace.
...not that I'm claiming they're intelligently designed, though I'm willing to allow for the possibility.
May your #caturday be blessed with the trust of someone much smoller than you. I must now focus on this warm person.
@Colman This is the conclusion I have also reached. TLDR: all mineral extraction should be taxed at a rate sufficient to cover the costs (best estimate) of fixing the environmental damage caused by how it is processed and used.
(...and the revenue generated thereby should be used to, you know, fix said damage -- or reuse/recycle materials as much as possible to minimize it. e.g. pay people to repair and upgrade electronics, rather than grinding them up and sending the results to the poor side of town, locally or globally. Pay people to repair clothes and furniture. Pay for recycling plastics that aren't "cost-effective" to recycle. Pay for research into better ways to recycle things. Dump billions or trillions into mass transit, because it's so much more efficient than cars. ...and so on)
@cstross I reached the conclusion over a decade ago that humans range ethically over the entire spectrum -- from basically* 100% good to basically* 100% evil.
Key point: evil people exist. I tend to get pushback when I use the word "evil" ("I don't believe in the supernatural!"), so maybe "completely selfish" is a better term in some contexts.
...and then one is rather forced to reach the conclusion that the global wealth/power system is or has evolved into (since at least Reagan/Thatcher) something which rewards "the worst of the worst" (once again, every accusation is a confession).
...and that the element which has most enabled this shift or intensification is the power that technology creates. (I could go on at length about this.)
Key point: humanity isn't inherently bad or self-destructive; we just haven't learned how to keep the problem-children away from the dangerous stuff -- because there didn't used to be so much of it, and it kind of happened rather suddenly, speaking in terms of cultural-evolutionary timeframes.
So the problem now is twofold: (1) how do we keep the bad people away from the dangerous things, and (2) how do we prise their greedy little fingers off those things in the first place?
These aren't easy problems to solve, but (final key point) I do think they're solvable. We just have to get enough people really understanding the problem in these terms (assuming I'm not wrong), and working together on solutions.
* allowing for error-margin and the fact that no real thing is ever perfectly in accordance with any ideal
Hey #retrocomputing Mastodon,
I need some data from a book of the Borland Open Architecture Handbook series in order to properly reverse engineer some code and its associated data from the nineties. I'll probably be helped by any of them, but If I had to choose, I'd prefer the C / C++ version over the Pascal version.
I'll lodge an interlibrary loan request on Monday, but I'd really appreciate some clues for sourcing a PDF. Code from the accompanying floppy would be nice to have, but I really need the book more than the code; it's a book from the time when books were big and floppies were tiny.
Thanks in advance!
A former girlfriend, called as a witness, testified that she had also climbed the Großglockner with Thomas P in 2023. She said he had abandoned her on the route at night after her head torch ran out of battery, leaving her distressed. “So that was the last mountain expedition we undertook together,” she said.
Ye gods.
:tootcat: To answer a question from a report this morning: we instaban any accounts that are just straight-up commercial advertising. I even added this as a "server rule" last month or so, but they don't seem to have noticed.
To be clear: self-promotion is fine, selling stuff via fedi is fine, and even officially representing an organization or company, under its name rather than the name of the human running the account, is fine -- as long as the account's purpose is positive engagement and not just ad copypasta.
There's a lot of theoretical grey area between those two, but fortunately not a lot of actual examples -- adbots almost always do certain things and are very easy to spot.
unawoke (adj.) : a state of such intense unawareness of being manipulated as to result in usage of the word "woke" as if it were derogatory
Proposal: well-loved fictional characters campaigning for their right not to be owned by the oligarchy
If anyone wants to write up a summary of the day's (or week's) news, I will read it in one or more appropriate character-voices.
(I'm thinking Kermit the Frog by default, but others are available.)
Welcome to our digital den of felinosity*, @Simianbeard! :tootcat:
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(*we at TootCat are are proud purveyors of Schrödinger's Coolness and/or Heppitude 👓❔⚛️)
