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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 22nd, 2024

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  • That’s OK, they’ll know not to mess with me.

    Especially after the news cycles through hundreds of otherwise inexplicably brutal events like ‘oil company boardroom welded shut full of heaters’, ‘bee killing pestocide.producer found locked in a room full of wasps’, ‘putin awakes in room full people he’s been oppressing’, ‘guy who invented mobile game adverts could only leave his house after clicking on a very small button that’s actual hit box is slightly off the graphic’






  • Absolutely it is and it’s a growing movement, my 3d printer is old and cheap but it’s already stopped me buying a whole class of products (i.e. small plastic fixings and cases) the newer technologies are incredibly cool especially some of the pick-and-place enabled multi toolhead models.

    Since I first started following the reprap project home fabrication has increased in quality massively, there are a lot of sites with endless things you can download that have continually improved over the years. CAD and slicers have improved hugely, they’re going to continue to at an increasing rate not only as more people use them but coding tools are getting better too - my projects have benefitted hugely from ai streamlining the coding process I’m sure CAD software writers are benefitting too.

    We’re not too far from ai gen CAD which will be a game changer, having chat gpt style ai help guide you through putting together open source projects will help users too - being able to say ‘i need to upgrade the motor in my washing macjine’ and ai can help select a range of options ‘this motor and that controller or thia controller and that motor…’ finding local companies that will fabricate the parts for you so they plug into the bits you fabricate at home, or local companies fabrication open source designs.

    Collaborative design projects are the key, I’ve been working with a few people trying to find methods that make it easy for large amounts of people doing small things to make meaningful progress on big projects. I think it’ll become common for most people to be involved in at least some form of collaborative project once people are used to using open source designed items fabricated in the way generics are.


  • Korea has a huge problem with toxic masculinity and shame culture, it’s started to come to a head as more Korean women grow up using tiktok and Twitter which gives them a more global perspective and makes them less likely to accept bullshit.

    The rule for women has been ‘we don’t care what happens to you as long as no one finds out about it, and if they do its your fault’ which is tied strongly to their very competitive culture. One ‘stain’ on your record snd you’re ruined. Tiktok is spreading a more western expectation in Korean women and some Korean men which angers the traditionalist element and results in headlines like this.



  • I looked it up, the ACLU said it “unnecessarily intrudes on the fundamental rights of marriage without due cause” and fought prior attempts to legislate against it. Planned Parenthood were against it because they said it was a slippery slope that might affect abortion rights (I didn’t see rational for this supplied but assume they have some)

    So it wasn’t Hollywood as the other poster glibly asserted, actually movies like ‘childbrides of the ozarks’ were important in brining it to popular attention and helping initial pushes against it. Currently there are democrats pushing for legislation to ban in, supported in many case by the ‘evil Hollywood elites’ as seen from conspiracy theory world as they’re big donors and fund raisers for democratic causes but also ACLU and PP so possibly yeah they were slightly involved in the ban being resisted but not in the way suggested.

    The ACLU have since chances their stance on child marriage, I imagine planned parenthood have too but I couldn’t find that stated. Most current resistance is coming from religious focused Republicans.




  • Hmm seems that’s leaving a lot of room for disparity, have you considered establishing a testing centre where people go to check their compatibility and permission to date is only given if both are intellectually and emotionally within a set margin of each other.

    And I really don’t think we can allow people incapable of deciding their own romantic and sexual partners to make important choices that affect the nation. How can you say someone is too silly to decide who to spend time with but should be able to choose the longterm future of millions of people?



  • American passenger trains are absurdly bad, I tried to book a return between two neighboring cities and evey single thing about it is stupid and expensive. I would have had to book the exact train which is annoying anyway but to make ot worse any at a useful time are are all insane prices and the train stations were both awkward and stupid. We might have to kill time waiting for our exact train but we can’t do it near the station because theres nothing there.

    You guys need to start acting upset that china is so fad ahead and get everyone charged up to update the railways.




  • It’s easy to be glib but the actual reality is far more complex than you want it to be, here’s a good simple video talking about the difference between good tree planting projects and bad ones

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9k-22Lv9bU - Simon Clark, when tree planting hurts the climate

    He doesn’t go into the bad very deeply but they’re are plenty of other resources if you’re interested. The tree planting projects he does talk about are great and beneficial to the climate but their benefits are so much more than the small help they give the environment - is great treed are being planted when done in the right place but they won’t save us alone and it’s difficult to do

    The education aspect is vital, one tool that’s got a lot of promise is the node and branch analysis that plantCV does, there are projects working on using that to look at a tree and model it from images to highlight which limbs to cut and where for effective copicing, as well as other plant health info like tracking diseases or pests and providing good eco solutions. If a charity could give access to such a tool to subsistence farmers in their native languages (via an LLM like metas open-source models) that would be far more effective than their current efforts protecting training video onto the side of a building.

    One of the best eco solutions though is not longstanding forests it’s actually maintained cycles of smaller fast growing plants like willow, hemp, or even biowaste from crops or things like sidewalk grasses from.managed spaces. They collect the biomass using a non destructive cropping method then dry it in a thermal solar collector before burning it, the heat drives a turbine to generate electricity and the smoke goes upto the chimney where a portion of that electricity is used to create an electric charge over a membrain which collects over 90% of the carbon - this is then converted into echems (electronically derived chemicals, lubricants, fuels, or building materials.) These are used then at end of life we chuck them in a hole, ideally a used coal mine so that carbon goes back where it came from.

    It’s not a choice between eco utopia and tech hell, take a bio recycling center as an example, currently they’re incredibly limited with people having to manually remove contaminants which means loads gets missed and we actually end up adding plastic and chemicals to farm fields, the process is slow and results in low quality ‘soil improver’ which is why to stop total soil death we’d either need to starve as our arable land lays fallow or cover it in chemical fertilizer (which would could make at the carbon capture plant btw rather than the current ugly supply chain) a better option is automation and ai enabled permaculture integrated into human living spaces, cities teaming with life and covered in plants all being maintained by automated tools with their biowaste taken (via underground cargo networks if we’re blessed) to have the carbon extracted and useful things made with it.

    All of this is possible with the science we know, solutions are still being engineered but if we put nasa levels of effort into it then we could have the start of things in place within five years (the education tools, facility automation, ground broken for at-scale biocarbon extraction plants, and home garden automtion)

    Trees are our friends but tech is not our enemy




  • You’re absolutely delusional if you think no one wants code done quicker and easier, and that’s not to .mention the endless other things it makes possible like giving people access to vital services like heathcare in their native language, etc, etc.

    These are things that are going to totally change the world for the better, removing power from corporations and giving to to people. You may not understand that because you’re not involved in actually doing anything productive but it’s a reality everyone can see.

    Yes things have been scams there are also things that have dramatically changed the world for the better, heathacare and education in remote and impoverished areas all entirely depends on the mobile networks. They’re also now absurdly cheap, the cost and effort of sending text used to be prohibitive but now you can video chat with your whole family all day every day at no extra thanks to a technology which became ubiquitous.

    As for your very wise solution of ‘just hire more developers’ yes that is why corporations are able to capture and control markets, a world where only the rich have the power to make things and compete is a horrible late capitalist hell - stop defending capitalism just because you’re used to it, yes you have an affluent life thanks to the suffering of others which is great for you but I don’t want to live like that, I don’t want to require children to slave in cocoa and coffee plantations or starving mothers to work 16 hour days in fast fashion garment factories when we have the ability to free those people and give them good lives by harnessing ai to help automate boring and laborious tasks.

    Capitalism is not as good as you seem to think it is, learn about the reality of capitalism beyond your glib bubble and you’ll realize that ai tools are vital for a fair world and a world at peace.