Things seeming boring and dry is your mind telling you that you’re trying to learn something that isn’t interesting to you. Fancy tricks to hide that core truth won’t undo it.

Why do you think you want to learn Marxist theory? To have status among leftists? Go punch a Nazi. To understand modern or historical leftists? Their actions aren’t guided by Marxist theory. To have status among political theorists, economists, and liberals? Lol. Lmao even.

To gleam a better way to have a succesful revolution that results in a better society? Okay, cool, do you have a community of people that won’t starve to death within days of trade being cut off? If no, congratulations, now you know all Marxist theory that you need to know until you do have such a community.

The EU keeps coming within inches of voting for making secure encryption impossible. Chat Control would have been worse for privacy than anything the US has.

That’s valid for workers in a capitalist system or for capitalists trying to scam people. But why would someone sign their real name to unchecked AI slop for an open source project? It would risk ruining their reputation for little personal gain.

The Artemis program (more specifically the Space Launch System) is kickbacks for senators in the form of a spaceship that uses components manufactured in every congressional district at a massively inflated cost. It has been in the making since before SpaceX launched their first rocket, facing massive cost overruns (more corruption) and delays (more corruption).

Yeah, they’re out back injecting themselves with estrogen and planning anarchocommunist revolution.

So like USAians having to pay taxes to the US when they work outside the US?

Lemmy doesn’t have an anti-AI policy. It has people that hate AI, and some communities have rules that forbid AI in some contexts, but any instance federated with db0 is at the very least tolerant of AI.

Allegedly, the “developers” of the app behave poorly towards “code contributors” who did large amounts of work for free, leading to those contributors leaving to start Morphe.

Later, ReVanced allegedly copied a lot of Morphe code without attribution, when the Morphe open source licence required attribution, with an alleged screenshot of the ReVanced discord channel showing a developer wanting to use AI to automatically copy Morphe code. The ReVanced subreddit also allegedly bans people who bring up Morphe.

In many cases, it’s easier to have an online culture with an anti-AI policy than a local one. A bunch of people already insist on using AI when interacting with others irl, and many more are passively supportive of them doing so. (i.e. “they don’t care”, but in a very different way from how “they don’t care” about someone eating vegan).

So an online group that has persistent identities where it’s hard to get a new account with a good status whose culture opposes AI is going to be much easier to keep AI-free than your local neighborhood third space.

But by the same token, what is unsuitable for trees today doesn’t have to be unsuitable a decade from now. Plant growth affects the climate. Retaining moisture, stabilizing day-night temperatures, retaining topsoil, changing surface albedo, triggering cloud formation, etc.

Ideally a mega-project is thousands of small projects being attempted at once in a way that is useful even if only a fraction of them work. Those 10% of places that worked could be used as a jumping off point for further efforts in the region, and in all cases people learned valuable agriculture skills they can take with them for the rest of their lives.

Almost as if this one guy is just a figurehead for a larger political movement.

Rowling spends almost every bit of income she gets on funding anti-transgender organisations and literal fascists (such as Posie Parker), whose lobbying efforts have turned every major British party against transgender healthcare, resulting in transgender healthcare becoming practically inaccessible through legal means with waiting lists lasting decades.

In terms of its material impact, buying HP merch is equivalent to buying a swastika flag from a neonazi store. You can be assured that every cent of profit will go to funding fascism. The only difference is the aesthetic of having HP merch versus having nazi merch.

The last time everybody was touching a solid object connected to the Earth by touching other solid objects is probably around 15,000 years ago, when humans crossed over into the Americas. Before then, it would probably occur regularly that nearly all humans are asleep and the handful that are awake happen to all be touching the ground.

Genetic engineering is quietly making headway, but has the potential for massive changes to our way of life. If we can start reliably programming living material, nothing will look the same, hopefully avoiding Cronenbergian results.

The author spends almost every bit of income she gets on funding anti-transgender organisations and literal fascists (such as Posie Parker), whose lobbying efforts have turned every major British party against transgender healthcare, resulting in transgender healthcare becoming practically inaccessible through legal means with waiting lists lasting decades.

In terms of its material impact, buying HP merch is equivalent to buying a swastika flag from a neonazi store. You can be assured that every cent of profit will go to funding fascism. The only difference is the aesthetic of having HP merch versus having nazi merch.

Anakin was unable to suppress his love and other emotions in the way the Jedi demanded, true. But it is because of the false dichotomy between Jedi emotional denial and Sith narcissistic indulgence that this meant Anakin fell to the dark side. Luke broke the dichotomy and did good through his love of his father.

You guys are paying for piracy? I thought that was a joke.

What’s wrong with torrenting?

What do you think a “peacekeeper” is? For reference, this is one of the first results I got when I searched the web for “UN peacekeeper”.

George Lucas clearly intended the Jedi to be wrong. Side-stepping a debate about the morality of their texual actions, they are narratively put on the “wrong” role. The whole arc of the third (sixth) movie is how Luke proves Yoda wrong that love and attachment lead to a fall to the dark side, with the tension coming from the audience’s credence in Yoda’s statement. And the prophecy that Anakin brings balance to the Force is fulfilled when he reduces the number of Jedi to equal the number of Sith (2) and later the number of Sith to equal the number of Jedi (0), implying the Jedi temple as an institution was unbalanced and the best number of Jedi (and Sith) is zero.

This is talking about the weather conditions at which a person is guaranteed to die if they are outside for six hours in the shade (or at night).

Previously climate scientists said this would happen at a wet bulb temperature¹ of 35 Celsius, theoretically enough to prevent a sweat-drenched human body from overheating. However, research has demonstrated the threshold is lower and doesn’t perfectly follow a single wet bulb temperature. And the scientific article that the news article is about shows these conditions have already occurred several times, when it was previously thought this threshold had not been breached yet.

Of course people can find shelter in an air conditioned buildings, underground, or under a forest canopy. But billions of people do not have access to these options. At some point they can either die or migrate, and this research shows that point requires less climate change than previously predicted. Combined with climate change occurring at a faster rate than the median expectation, mass climate migration is coming a lot sooner than expected.

¹: the temperature a thermometer indicates if the bulb is wet. If the air is dry, evaporation will cause this temperature to be lower than the air temperature, which is also the temperature a thermometer indicates if the bulb is dry.

But perception is for a large part embedded in memory, which differs individually. For me steel foundries smell amazing because I used to play on the beach near a steel foundry, to the point I need to put effort into understanding that it’s actually kind of acrid. So am I still “having the same perception” as someone who doesn’t have the lived experience?

This can happen at a society-wide level too. Liminal beige and seafoam green were not intended to create a feeling of disquiet, but of calm neutrality. Modern audiences perceive them as disquieting because they have been systematically used in our society to impose a sense of calm on un-calm situations, such as operating rooms or hallways in sketchy buildings.

I honestly don’t know how much of the commonality of associations across cultures comes from instinct and how much comes from the fact that all children learn to live on the same planet with the same physical laws. I would bet that for 99.9% of children, their first experience with a strong sulphur smell is going to be from rotten eggs (or similar rotten goods) that others act disgusted by. So the fact that sulphur smells disgusting to the vast majority of adults is not evidence for instinct over memory. The same goes for green plants, red blood, blue skies, etc.