• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 2nd, 2023

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  • consequence of the terminally-online brain rot

    Disagree. Its a consequence of corporations loudly proclaiming their support for groups when it cost nothing (think Black History Month here in the US). Corporations like to use a lot of empty marketing talk about societal issues when they can get away with it and ppl have decided to fight that by pushing companies to actually takes stands. Also, corporations here in the US have much larger voices than individual (and again this is because of the corporations’ own actions), so some ppl see it as a way they can actually have an influence on their govt.




  • Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox

    Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization

    This is from the Mozilla release. The second quote does say “Firefox Organization” and not “Firefox”, but it seems clear they are planning on integrating AI into Firefox.

    But, I’ve reread @NotSteve_'s comment and they were saying the funding earned from AI could be put into Firefox, not AI itself. NotSteve wasn’t claiming that putting AI into Firefox would bring in more funding, only that AI could be a separate source of revenue. So my question is moot.





  • If you know the person’s twitter handle, its simple to search for them. People coming from centralized systems, don’t realize that you have to include the domain for fediverse searches to work. I couldn’t just find you by searching for p03locke, I’d have to search for @p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com.

    Also, if my instance has never interacted with you, your profile probably won’t show posts when I find you (though this is a choice and I don’t know why implementations won’t fix it.)

    Again, instance blocks makes this more complicated because my instance could block yours or yours could block mine and that would prevent this search from working but the user wouldn’t know that.


  • Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they’re not familiar with decentralization, they don’t understand what that means. It’s especially weird that they can’t directly join mastodon on the site called “joinmastodon” but have to go to another site.

    Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won’t know why.

    If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there’s a lot of snags here.





  • They are different because most users weren’t aware of XMPP. They weren’t making a conscious choice to use an open standard. The fediverse, on the other hand, has grown specifically because people are seeing the value of an open ecosystem.

    When google started removing XMPP support, users weren’t aware and didn’t care (other than losing contact with a few holdouts). If Meta implements AP support and then removes that support or modifies it so that it breaks some of expectations of the fediverse, most users will move to instances that don’t use Meta extensions. Meta can not take your instance or make it use their extensions, so an open fediverse will always exist.






  • MOXIE is a Scale Model for a Future Big MOXIE
    To launch from Mars, a small crew of human explorers will need 25 to 30 tons of oxygen, or about the weight of a tractor-trailer! To make that much oxygen would require a 25,000 to 30,000 watt power plant. The Perseverance power system only provides about 100 watts, so MOXIE can only make a small fraction of the oxygen that a future “Big MOXIE” would need to make.

    In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we’d need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That’s not trivial.

    Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.


  • We can’t breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We’d need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.

    But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn’t just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.



  • You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues?

    Scientists catalog what we know and don’t know and try to chip away at the list of things we don’t know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don’t know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don’t know.

    The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:

    No one has been conceived in low gravity, no fetuses have developed in low gravity, so we simply don’t know if there is a problem. Astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and no one knows how that plays out long term

    I was shocked to learn that no one really knows how to construct a long-term habitable settlement for either the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are lots of hand-wavy ideas about lava tubes and regolith shielding. But the details are just… not there.

    For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.

    Space colonization may happen, but it’s incredibly doubtful that it’ll happen in our lifetimes.