twig
@twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Hearing is be-leafing: Students invent quieter leaf blower 2 days ago:
Fuck leaf blowers. I don’t care if they’re quieter. They son’t really solve any problems. They’re not good at removing debris, but just blowing it to a place where someone else will deal with it.
Also… removing debris on its own is a dubious pursuit, since “debris” could also be termed “stuff that holds moisture longer and slows the effect of drying soil during drought conditions.”
- Comment on Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’ 2 weeks ago:
Everyone needs a union
- Comment on Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO 2 weeks ago:
The fact that generative AI is being used as a means of large corporations consolidating even more wealth rather than attempting to free the working class from shitty, menial jobs shows that we’re way the fuck off with how we conceptualize of “work” as a concept.
This should be a good thing, but for lots of people this will suck.
- Comment on The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco 2 weeks ago:
America desperately needs to enact policies that put restrictions on wealth accumulation. There are lots of ways to do this.
- Comment on ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US 3 weeks ago:
Excellent
- Comment on What a TikTok Ban Would Mean for the U.S. Defense of an Open Internet 3 weeks ago:
Fwiw I fully support your reasoning that TikTok in particular should be viewed as a source of particularly insidious propaganda at this moment. I’ve been tracking this for years and it seems very obvious to me.
However… when you’re talking about Instagram you’re talking about the company that offered the tools used in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Disinformation on Meta is not new, and quite suspiciously, Meta is shutting down CrowdTangle (a tool developed by Meta for tracking disinformation) just months before the US federal election. wired.com/…/meta-kills-crucial-transparency-tool-…
Fuck TikTok, and also fuck Meta. I can be happy that tiktok might be banned and also despise Meta
- Comment on Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge 4 weeks ago:
Yeah OK that’s fair.
- Comment on Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge 4 weeks ago:
Jobs didn’t know shit. He made a bunch of predictions, some of them right, some of them not at all right. He just took credit for other peoples’ work, mostly Wozniak’s. The man was every bit the piece of shit Elon is.
Worth listening to the 3-part series on Jobs from Behind the Bastards: iheart.com/…/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-1563…
- Comment on Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge 4 weeks ago:
You love to see it
- Comment on fossil fuels 4 weeks ago:
I honestly don’t think we need to settle on trans oceanic shipping as a hard requirement.
Also, in terms of transportation-based emissions, personal vehicle usage accounted for 58% of the total emissions in the US in 2019. This number doesn’t need to exist. The fossil fuel industry has structured cities the way they are and lobbied against efficient transportation in order to make themselves more money.
Like even if we’re accepting trans oceanic freight as a given, which I don’t think we should on the scale we do now, emissions could be drastically reduced mostly be better planning of transportation.
- Comment on Wgen you donate, do you ever think of the person that gets your blood and how high their hospital bill will be? 4 weeks ago:
Tragically, no. I thought so too until quite recently. They did improve things but it’s pretty rough
Since a viral load can be reduced to zero through medication, HIV-positive folks can be non contagious. The use of condoms, even if the viral load is not suppressed through medication, seriously reduces the risk of HIV transmission. They don’t ask questions about condom usage. To be clear I’m not suggesting that HIV-positive folks should be donating blood, just that the actual factors for transmission are way more specific than “butt stuff = AIDS” the way that they imply. The result of this is still excluding queer folks end up getting excluded with language that’s less overtly hostile and more implicitly hostile.
The screening doesn’t exclude people based how many partners a person has slept with, or whether they have used protection (both of which are massive risk factors for transmission) and instead basically forbids anyone who engages in anal sex from donating blood.
- Comment on Wgen you donate, do you ever think of the person that gets your blood and how high their hospital bill will be? 4 weeks ago:
That is true. And Canadian Blood Services is still super homophobic.
- Comment on Wgen you donate, do you ever think of the person that gets your blood and how high their hospital bill will be? 4 weeks ago:
So this is letter board is clearly advertising Canadian blood services. Canada’s healthcare system could use a lot of work, but it is far from the dumpster fire that American healthcare is.
If you want to shitpost about this and assume as Americans do that America is the only place, maybe try to find an image that isn’t so obviously from a country with universal healthcare.
- Comment on So much for free speech on X; Musk confirms new users must soon pay to post 4 weeks ago:
Pay to play speech
- Comment on Progress! 4 weeks ago:
It’s super unpleasant both in the delivery (eating a sufficient amount of nutmeg for the effects is hard to do without vomiting, and also in experience. Buuut my experience was basically like a fever drean
- Comment on Progress! 4 weeks ago:
This just sounds like straight up torture with extra steps.
No rehabilitation, no isolation of dangerous individuals from the general population. I’m decidedly anti-incarceration but at least there are arguments for it in place of something functional and just.
This just doesn’t solve any problems and adds some new ones. It sounds unbelievably cruel.
- Comment on VPN by Google One is shutting down for good 4 weeks ago:
Which is that?
- Comment on Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt 5 weeks ago:
So that’s actually not true, but for reasons that I think are weirder and more interesting than anything implied by either side of this “debate.”
There are actually about 50% more women who have Y chromosomes than originally expected, and also: microchimerism seems to be extremely common in people who give birth, seemingly regardless of whether or not they give birth to children with XY chromosomes. But the genetic remnants of fetuses that have XY chromosomes stay in the body for many years (possibly a lifetime), and this has a fairly significant effect on genetic composition.
I get what you’re saying and I don’t totally disagree, but I think the main thing that I keep learning is that “biological sex” is just not actually a particularly meaningful concept.
- Comment on People think onlyfans is weird 5 weeks ago:
I was thinking he looked like Ricky from trailer park boys.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
All I’m trying to point out is that distinct cultures are worthy of respect and shouldn’t be glossed over.
But be real with me: can you think of a single effort for “planetary unification” that wasn’t a total nightmare? I sure can’t.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
Fire pistons are so damn cool. Yeah, that makes sense then.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
I’m really not “arguing against agriculture,” I’m pointing out that there are other modes of subsistence that humans still practice, and that that’s perfectly valid. There are legitimate reasons why a culture would collectively reject agriculture.
But in point of fact, agriculture is not actually more efficient or reliable. Agriculture does allow for centralized city states in a way that foraging/hunting/fishing usually doesn’t, with a notable exception of many indigenous groups on the western coast of turtle island.
A study positing that in fact, agriculturalists are not more productive and in fact are more prone to famine: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/
But the main point I was trying to make is that different expressions of human culture still exist, and not all cultures have followed along the trajectory of the dominant culture. People tend to view colonialism, expansion and everything that means as inevitable, and I think that’s a pretty big problem.
- Comment on 96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Data with Google, Meta, Data Brokers, and Other Third Parties, Study Finds 5 weeks ago:
This is called “enumerating badness” and the findings here are both probably not that meaningful and based on a lot of assumptions.
I am curious to see what data is being transmitted, but not a lot is actually revealed by this
- Comment on Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets 5 weeks ago:
I get what you’re saying, kind of…
But also, most modern earbuds usually sound quite good. Quality in general has become such a bizarre moving target, but here’s my take: We’ve become so used to constant improvement at the expense of satisfaction. I can barely notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. In my mind they’re both “good quality” and therefore I’m satisfied. Same goes for audio quality. I’ve used a few pairs of earbuds and they have sounded “good.”
As a culture, we need to stop with throwing away of perfectly good devices, because it’s extremely harmful to the planet’s occupants.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.
Humankind isn’t a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.
It’s not that it took 1 million years to “figure out” farming. It’s that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don’t practice agriculture, because it’s not actually advantageous in many ways – stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.
Also where did you come up with the number 12,000 for “figuring out” the combustion engine? Genuinely curious. Like were we “working on it” for 12k years? I don’t get it. But this isn’t exactly a net positive and has come with some pretty disastrous consequences. I say this because you’re proposing a linear path for “humanity” forward, when the reality is that humans are many things, and progress viewed in this way has a tendency toward racism or at least ethnocentrism.
But also yeah, the point of this meme is “artists are valuable.”