balsoft

Even if we ignore the blatant "chinaman bad", this doesn't make any sense. Why would they disappear people? This would still be a great outcome for them even with 80% success rate or something. The only difference between 80% and 100% is a tiny bit of nerd cred in recreational science communities. Even the logistical effort of "disappearing" people, while keeping everyone quiet about it, is clearly not worth the benefit here, let alone the potential international scandal.

I am able to find joy in science and life in general. I will state it in a different way: this is not something the average person needs to worry/think about, unless they are interested themselves.

The original tweet (or whatever this is) has the same energy to me as "are we just gonna ignore ?". For people who are interested: they are likely already aware; for people who are not interested: it's safe to ignore it.

In the grand scheme of things:

• We're turbofucking the climate, even though we've understood the warming effects of CO₂ for 170 years, and had viable solutions to climate change for like 50. And yet we're increasing CO₂ emissions year after year. It's not certain the human civilization as it currently is will survive the next century.
• We're throwing non-biodegradable plastics everywhere, even though we've known for like 50 years that it is devastating for many ecosystems and human health.
• Capitalism is squeezing the global working class ever harder with each passing day, and yet class consciousness is not growing fast enough, despite us scientifically understanding the unsustainability and evils of capitalism for like 160 years.

So yeah, in that grand scheme of things, making models of the larger universe is not actually that important. First we need to make use of the discoveries made way over a century ago.

Wasn't this the main selling point of the cybertruck, almost verbatim?

This is a really cool photo. Thanks for sharing!

Far from the worst shit to happen under capitalism, especially since it seems randomized in this case and not dependent on user's characteristics or history. Using discounts as a way to study consumer behavior has been happening since forever, and I'd argue it would be useful even under socialism. The only issue here is lack of transparency into the whole thing, but it could be trivially fixed by some legislation that requires a price history to be shown for every item, and personalized discounts be declared separately and in an easy-to-understand way. E.g. if this was clearly marked as "eggs are $4.50, but we are offering you a personal discount of $1" this story would seem like a nothing-burger.

To me, it's simple.

Crash out in the evening, be gone in the morning? A bed in a dormitory will do fine.

Stay for a few nights, go out every day to see the city/hike/etc? Gimme a cheap hotel room with a shared bathroom.

A longer stay for a workation/etc? Get a cheap apartment (at least a studio with a bathroom and a kitchen), because going out to eat fucking sucks.

Most jobs on the planet can't be done with WFH, because they require doing stuff with your hands.

The actual solution to traffic is: viable alternatives to driving, such as rapid, comfortable, accessible transit and cycling infrastructure. (once that's done, let's ban private cars in cities altogether, they're the worst thing to ever happen to cities).

While I agree with you that art will be there for as long as humans exist (since it's something a lot of us like to do), access to other's art might be severely diminished, especially in atomized societies.

Let's be real, for a lot of people, internet is the source for most of their art enjoyment. As more and more of the internet is filled with soulless AI slop, it might be more and more difficult to find real art here.

I also don't anticipate that AI will fully replace art on the internet - if you look hard enough, you will always be able to find niche communities of people doing their thing. E.g. I am quite fond of art communities here on lemmy, which seem to be mostly AI-free for now (since there's no monetary incentive to posting here).

But I can see how someone who loves art and finds all their life's meaning in it can be concerned with all the slop filling up mainstream artsy social media like instagram/pinterest/music streaming/etc.

It's categorically worse for privacy than signal. The latter is at least e2e encrypted. Probably also worse than WhatsApp, they also claim to be e2e encrypted, but it's less certain because the apps are closed-source.

You can use it as long as you consider all conversations on there, including direct messages, as public and readable by any three letter agency out there. Telegram is not e2e encrypted, which means Telegram LLC can read all your messages and share them as they see fit.

Also remember that they have your phone number and IP address

In short, planning a night out with friends is probably fine, coordinating a protest is probably not.

BTW this is also the case for most network printers. You can just print to them by sending a pdf/postscript file with netcat. CUPS is rarely needed nowadays.