“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

  • 51 Posts
  • 1.03K Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 25th, 2024

help-circle
  • Basically what @meekah@lemmy.world said: the idea is to be practicable. Here’s a stream of disconnected thoughts about this:

    • What you pointed out is actually consistent with how a disproportionate amount of vegans are staunchly anticapitalist.
    • A cut-and-dry example of someone who’s still vegan but eats animal products based on “practicable” is someone whose prescription medication contains gelatin with no other pill type; vegans aren’t going to say “lol ok too bad bozo you’re not vegan anymore”.
    • The core focus of veganism has traditionally been non-human animals with the idea that a reduction of cruelty and exploitation toward humans is, at most, peripheral. This is changing in my opinion, especially when questions like “vegan Linux distro” don’t involve animals short of what the devs eat.
    • Based on what you say (as someone else pointed out), a distro based solely on FLOSS would probably be regarded as “the most vegan” if that were ever measured by anyone (it never would be).
    • It’s a weird analogy, but after you’re done using and purchasing products derived from animals, what’s “practicable” from there is kind of like a vegan post-game. Many vegans, for example, won’t eat palm oil because of how horribly destructive it is to wildlife.
    • Growing all your own food is in that post-game area of “practicable”. It’s up to you to decide if that’s practicable for you. It’s up to you to implement that if you think it is or, if it’s not, to maybe think about how else you can reduce harm with how you buy vegetables. It’s up to you if you want to share that idea and help other people implement it themselves. It’s widely accepted that it’s not up to you to determine if it’s practicable for others.

  • I would say that most vegans, even if they’ve never heard it, at least approximately follow the Vegan Society’s famous definition:

    Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

    Striking the parts that seem irrelevant to this specific question:

    Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for […] any […] purpose […]

    Keep in mind that “animals” in that first part is widely treated as “humans and non-human animals”. So you would have to decide 1) to what extent cruelty was inflicted to create the distro, 2) to what extent people and non-human animals were exploited to create the distro, and 3) if there exist practicable alternatives that meaningfully reduce (1) and (2).









  • Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:

    • Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning – at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target for a well-fleshed-out article.
    • Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
    • And even then, the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
    • And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
    • And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can intuitively jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
    • Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).

    What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.

    This not only bypasses the hard work real, human editors put in for free in favor of some generic slop that’s impossible to QA, but it also bypasses the spirit of Wikipedia that if you see something wrong, you should be able to fix it.




  • No, they definitely are AI. ChatGPT for example is a generative pretrained transformer (GPT) is a transformer model is a deep learning model is a machine learning model is AI.

    It’s just that the general public has no fucking idea what “AI” is due to being swamped in marketing about a field they have zero background in and have been led to believe is some kind of general intellect on the level of a human or smarter. In reality, a perceptron with one weight and one bias is machine learning is AI.

    Since the start, what “AI” is has been fairly arbitrary; it’s just the ability for a machine to perform tasks we’d associate with human intelligence. It doesn’t even need to be machine learning; that’s just one branch. The game Video Checkers (1980) for the Atari 2600 running on 128 bytes of RAM has AI that you play against. The bar isn’t high at all.


  • That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:

    1. Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
    2. Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
    3. Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.

    It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.




  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldMissing project?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    18 days ago

    it shouldn't be that hard?

    OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why aren’t you getting to work building the ground floor of something potentially highly lucrative?

    The response to “It shouldn’t be that hard” for FOSS is invariably “PRs welcome”.


  • The difference: Israel is in Syria for imperialist aggression. Ukraine is in Ukraine to protect their homeland from imperialist aggresssion. Combine that with Israel’s pathological need to cover up and deny their extensive, seemingly neverending war crimes in Gaza… Yeah, I don’t have any faith until Israel can prove this was opsec rather than covering up. Israel has destroyed their chance for benefit of the doubt.

    Even if it is opsec, they have no right being there, so fuck 'em. I hope their opsec isn’t maintained and their soldiers do die in much the same way I’d hope for a Russian base in Donetsk.


  • I don’t at all understand why the second law of thermodynamics is being invoked. Nonetheless, capillary condensation is already a well-studied phenomenon. As the scientific article itself notes, the innovation here over traditional capillary condensation would be the ability to easily remove the water once it’s condensed.


    Re: Entropy:

    • Entropy is a statistical phenomenon that tends to increase over time averaged across the entire body, i.e. the Universe. Not literally every part of the Universe needs to increase its entropy as long as on average it is increasing. You’re evidence of that: your body is a machine that takes entropy and pushes it somewhere else.
    • Water vapor is a high-energy state compared to liquid water. What you’re saying therefore is the opposite of how the second law works: water vapor’s energy tends to spread out over time until it eventually cools back to a liquid. Liquid water is a higher entropy state than water vapor.