ChatGPT, how do I join the jihad?

That’s probably overselling the importance of fertilizer a little. A huge proportion of the food we grow is completely wasted, rots without anyone eating it, or doesn’t “look nice” so gets fed to animals who could just as easily eat other food sources. Another gigantic portion of the is grown inefficiently and stupidly for political and cultural and other asinine reasons, grown in inefficient places, or are inefficient crops to begin with. Sometimes it’s all of the above, and sometimes it’s not even grown for food at all, it’s grown for oil. We burn it, because that’s environmentally friendly, somehow. Famine is not a global agricultural problem, it’s an economic problem, sometimes an intellectual property problem and almost always a political problem, it has nothing to do with lack of fertilizer, it never has been, and it almost certainly never will be. The whole system is rigged top to bottom, and fertilizer isn’t going to make or break it.

It always gets dark before the dawn. This system sucks and is evil. I expect its collapse to be even more evil, but I’m looking forward to building something better.

Ironic that they have their repos hiding behind Cloudflare, then.

It’s also a gift to Russia since middle-eastern oil is effectively shut down now and the price of oil is skyrocketing, so Putin can get a fresh injection of cash into his economy.

So… the doomsday clock has run out of time, is that what you’re saying? Seems apropos.

That may have been the intention but I doubt it ever worked as effectively as they claimed it would. Besides, it will probably cost at least 1 AI data-center of carbon emissions to continuously surveil all these people with TPMS sensors, so the argument could be made that you’re actually reducing carbon pollution at this point by removing yours.

Anything you post on the internet is public knowledge forever. End of discussion. Most people won’t care at all, in most cases almost nobody or perhaps even literally nobody will ever even see it, but the harder you try to hide it, the more the Streisand Effect will magnify it until eventually everyone knows about it.

Anyone telling you they’ll delete your data from the internet without clarifying that it is in fact impossible, is at worst deliberately lying to you usually for their own benefit, and at best making a promise they literally have zero ability to keep.

I would hope that Fediverse services will never lie to you and tell you your data is deleted, because it can’t be.

I’m going down the rabbit hole and people are forced to queue up for what I’m assuming is the equivalent of a serial key?

Not quite. A serial key is permanent, it lasts forever, although some software did try to use online and update services to identify bad serials this was trivial to block, because it’s essentially trying to backpedal a valid key into an invalid one. It only needs to be valid once, then you make sure to block anything that invalidates it afterwards (usually blocking the update servers at the DNS level), job done.

That’s different from a token. Tokens use something along the lines of at least rolling-code type security, similar to how your car keys or garage door opener keep generating new codes so someone with a scanner can’t just record the code it uses once and then have that be copied and replayed over and over again indefinitely. The trick with a token like this is that you need to keep updating it or it becomes invalid after some timeframe or number of uses. Hence the online activation. That’s required to get your next token or set of tokens.

They would be. That’s why you don’t tell them. If you’re treating your insurance company as your friend not an adversary, you probably don’t understand how their profits grow year over year.

I’ve been driving for 30 years. Do you want to guess how many times that’s happened to me?

Meanwhile, I’ve apparently been living in a totalitarian surveillance state for at least a few years now, and you know how many times that’s happened to me? I’ll give you a hint, it’s more than the number of times I’ve run over a nail causing me to drive around on low tire pressure without knowing it.

Despite our governments (well, one of our governments) the Canadian and American people still care for and look out for one another.

I’ll drink a cuba libre to that!

Even broken clocks are right twice a day. It doesn’t make them useful, they still belong in the trash.

I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I’m not sure that’s the ini style’s fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.

Systemd killed my father, but it’s okay because he was Darth Vader anyway.

That’s not proof that’s AI generated slop. It sounds plausible and it’s all nonsense.

Wayland is fine. Xorg was cool, and might still have a few uses, but we’ve moved past a point where it should be the default.

This is interesting, especially the idea of using the sun itself to cause the molecule to change state directly, instead of relying on electrical or other chemical steps. If they can do something to pull it off, great. Really cool idea.

However I have to point out that we can already store solar energy and release it as heat months (or years) later using synthetic fuels, which are completely carbon-neutral when burned and briefly carbon-negative when produced using renewable energy and atmospheric carbon (if required). It is rather inefficient yes, but with sufficient renewable energy, efficiency no longer needs to be our primary concern. In fact, I think overall we focus on efficiency far too much, to our detriment in many cases, durability and resiliency is often in direct contraction to efficiency, and we have created a lot of systems that are very fragile at the very limit of what’s possible in the name of efficiency and left ourselves very little breathing room. But that’s a different discussion.

Synthetic fuel is a fraught topic because it’s so vulnerable to greenwashing where fossil fuel companies muddy the waters with “carbon capture” and repackage their fossil fuels into “biodiesel” and “blue hydrogen” and other deceitful scams, and in practice there is little understanding of where the synthetic fuels are actually coming from due to the nuance involved. There is no accountability for abuse, and that makes them untenable at this stage.

However, it doesn’t HAVE to be like that. With proper regulation and oversight (which granted may not be possible in a world run by criminals and billionaire sociopaths), synthetic fuels would allow us to avoid turning the massive amounts of investment over the last 100 years into all the world’s fuel-burning equipment which is both functional, practical, and in many cases the best tool for the job, into illegal trash we are forced to dispose of. It is not trash, only fossil fuel is trash. Synthetic fuels would change the economics of fuel usage significantly, and some of that equipment might end up being trash anyway, but probably not all of it. We aren’t in a position to make those kind of fuels practical or affordable yet, but I urge people not to discount them completely for the future. Chemical energy storage is amazing, and fuel is a very potent and reliable form of chemical energy storage we are already very experienced with and well equipped for.

It’s especially important for the people who don’t “like” electric cars, continue to have range anxiety, still use fossil fuels for heat, or backup power, whatever, the idea of synthetic fuels should be left on the table, to leave the door open for their lovely classic gas guzzler to run on environmentally friendly fuel in the future. Because it is absolutely possible. It is a solution that we can at least be open to in the future when the impending crisis has started being addressed properly (if it ever gets to that point… *sigh*). The economy is going to say whatever the economy is going to say about it, and I get there are other priorities that need to be addressed first, but there’s no reason to slam the door in people’s face if they want to keep burning fuels. Provide a path forward to meet their needs, and let them make the decision whether it’s worth it to them or not. The heavy-handed, high-horse style “you’ll use an electric car from now on and you’ll LIKE it!” dictates really don’t help convince anyone of anything, and I think we need to understand that people do need to be convinced. Gently.

I think ActivityPub is closer to the right answer than ATProto, and ActivityPub’s issues (though many, as the author notes) are more manageable in the long run. I think the article makes a good analysis of the fundamental differences, but is a bit glib in referring to Piefed’s topics and discussion merging as a “joyful mess”. It’s not a mess at all. It’s making order out of the chaos, and it’s the right way to build on top of ActivityPub into something that is actually fluid enough for users to actually use.

Mailing lists were built on top of federated email in much the same way, and they formed enduring, resilient, well-structured communities, some that continue to this day (the LKML being perhaps the most notorious)

I think ATProto makes creating enduring communities too difficult, and BlackSky illustrates that perfectly. The author’s criticism of ActivityPub, on the other hand, seems to be that it makes creating communities too easy, and this results in a “mess”. I disagree, I think the mess is a necessary and inevitable part of having community. Communities are messy. They fracture and schism, they rejoin and reshape themselves. That’s normal. It is the responsibility of the software to make sense of the mess and make it presentable, and with ActivityPub, that is not only possible, it is happening. Piefed is the present example. I expect there will be more examples, and a wider variety of them, as the ecosystem continues to develop.

I think the biggest thing that ActivityPub still needs is better portability, for both users and communities, to allow moving servers more seamlessly. The “Personal Data Server” of Bluesky is not a bad concept, although I don’t love their implementation. I think ActivityPub can find a way to handle portability even better, but it doesn’t seem like it’s been a priority, and that’s fine. But it will need to happen eventually.