• 1 Post
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle









  • It’s silly to gripe about someone watching a movie for so long, but not because the person watching needs something to fill their life. If that was the only justification needed you could justify owning a yacht because it’s the only place you could get away.

    The real argument is that running a television is not very energy intensive, and being on the grid means the energy it does use is produced at a scale where the environmental impact is drastically reduced.

    I’ve had to reread your second to last paragraph multiple times because it just feels bonkers to go from saying that people enjoy television to saying people might kill themselves without it. What basis does that have in reality? I tried looking into it a little and the only search results regarding suicide and lack of tv discussed suicide coverage on tv and whether it increased suicides. Searching for whether people are happier without tv had a lot of anecdotal “yes” articles and articles relating to a study about teens being happier with less screen time. That seems fairly inconclusive and may just mean there’s a gap in the research that could be filled, but I think you’re really underestimating the average person’s ability to live without television.



  • If the author no longer has passion for his OSS project, and isn’t being paid for it, why is he still working on it? Why should he feel responsible for companies building their processes on a free piece of software without guaranteed support? Why the heck is he sacrificing sleep for something he claims not to care about anymore? It sounds to me like he’s not living his values.

    If compensation for volunteer work is mandated, it becomes less volunteer work and more of a part(or in some cases full)-time job. My understanding is that a core pillar of open source software is that anyone can contribute to it, which should make it easier for contributors to come and go. Based on the graph shown it would take more than a full-time job worth of money to meet his demand, which seems unlikely in any case, and it’s time for him to go. Either someone else will volunteer to pick up the slack, the companies using it will pay someone to pick up the slack like the author mentioned, or the software will languish, degrade, and stop being used.

    I don’t see how any of those outcomes suggest that people need to be paid for the time they voluntarily give. I could get behind finding better ways to monetarily support those who do want to get paid, but “how could it be easier to pay OSS contributors after their passion is gone?” is a lot less provocative of a headline.



  • Imagine you have a big board on your front lawn where people can come to write stuff and respond to others on the board. This board is an instance.

    Your neighbor has their own board, which they have “federated” with yours. Messages from your board can show up on their board, and people there can write on those messages same as ones native to that board.

    You can federate with them so their stuff shows on your board, or defederate if you don’t like the people there.

    Anyone with the ability to make a board can have one federated with other boards to make a really big web of boards, but to a person looking at your lawn’s board it feels like one big one.






  • There is a chapter or two from a book by philosopher Derek Parfit that tackles the transporter issue pretty head-on. It draws what I feel to be a pretty compelling distinction between the continuity of your conscious mind, referred to as Relation R, and the personal identity that is lost when using the transporter. He then asks which is more important. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.


  • There’s a book series based on using cloning and memory storage to accomplish very similar things called Undying Mercenaries. The main difference is instead of copying someone and keeping the copy on ice they have cybernetic implants that send engrams of their mind to remote storage, and if they die a clone can be rapidly grown and those stored memories saved to it. It gets pretty schlocky as time goes on, but it’s a fun premise to play around with.