Microsoft is pivoting its company culture

Oh yes, the thing they’re well known for succeeding at.

Though Islam has certainly become the primary target over the last 20 years.

He called during his televised speech to get rid of the “ruckus causers”, separately from the far right.

The current largest leftist party had (until last night) close to a third of Parliament, and have a reputation of loudly contesting shit they don’t stand for.

I really don’t think Macron’s intention is to give them a chance at more votes. If anything, he’s hoping this forces leftist voters to move towards the center, seeing as how his own party barely cleared 14% (the largest far right party did over 30, and a smaller splinter party got around 7% on its own).

My cynical take: he wants to let the far right win the legislative elections while he still has close to 3 years left in his term.

He thinks this will “show” their electorate that voting far right doesn’t get you what you want.

At the same time, he can take advantage of the media bashing the leftist party has been getting for their vocal opposition to Israel’s actions since October 7 2023, and run them out of Parliament. At least, it’s a gamble he’s willing to make.

He is just as much of a clueless, egotistical liberal as David Cameron was, so your analogy is sadly pretty accurate.

This cannot be tolerated, even under Eisenhower.

I suddenly want to insert this into my everyday life

According to Our World In Data (which claims to use the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy from 2023 as a data source), that waste is from producing around 70 TWh each year:

That only covers around a third of Switzerland’s energy consumption over those years. Furthermore, Switzerland is a small mountainous country with decent access to hydropower (making up around a third of its needs over the same years). They are not necessarily representative of the waste that would accumulate from a more agressive switch from fossil fuels to nuclear across the world (which is what we’re talking about, if I’m not mistaken).

France is about 10 times larger in surface area and according to the same source, consumed/produced over 1,000 TWh of nuclear energy each year:

And officially has still has no place to put the high-energy waste (source - in french), leaving it up to the plant’s owners to deal with it. There is an official project to come up with a “deep” geological storage facility, but no political will seems musterable to make that plan materialize beyond endless promises.

I should mention that I’m not super anti-nuclear, and I would certainly rather we focus on eliminating coal and oil power plants (and ideally natural gas ones as well) before we start dismantling existing nuclear reactors that are still in functioning order.

That being said, there are other problems with nuclear moving forwards besides waste management. The main one that worries me is the use of water for the cooling circuits, pumped from rivers or the sea. Not only do open cooling circuits have adverse affects on their surrounding ecosystems, as the planet gets warmer and the temperature swings during the hotter seasons become more pronounced, the power plants will become less efficient. The water going in will be at a higher temperature than it is today, and thus will absorb less energy from the nuclear reaction itself.

Overall, I don’t trust our current collective responsibility as a species to manage our current forms of nuclear production. Russia sent its own troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to dig trenches in contaminated soil last year, and they allegedly recognized last week that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is now “unsafe to restart” because of the military activity in the region.

The world has not experienced generalized warfare with nuclear power plants dotting the countryside; WW2 ended around a decade before the first nuclear power plants were up and running in the USSR, the UK, and the USA.

Not to mention how few European countries have access to uranium on their own soil/territory. Of course, most of the rare earth metals used in photoelectric panels and windmills aren’t found there either, but as least with “renewables” they are used once to make the machinery, not as literal fuel that is indefinitely consumed to produce power.

I don’t know enough about thorium-based reactors nor molten salt-based reactors to go to bat for them instead, but they seem like a more promising way for nuclear to remain relevant.

I was saying that it’s weird to blame Mastodon for “complex sign-up”, when you’re using a “3rd-party” tool to do so. That’s completely down to the app.

Ah, I understand now. Thanks for the correction.

Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first (especially for a procedure like signin-up) is beyond me.

You may or may not have heard this before, but the app is not the instance is not the platform. I registered both my Mastodon account and this Lemmy account via their respective instance websites. I used mastodon in the browser for literally over a year before installing an app for it on my phone.

Apps are alternative front-ends to the fediverse, even “official” ones.

“Basic stuff” is very weird to read for me when many of the internet services I have accounts for don’t have apps - and I would rather they never make an app for it. My electricity bills, my hosting costs, my home internet, all are done through web pages that I can access from any internet-connected device, unlike an app.

Not to mention I appreciate being able to type things on a bigger screen and physical keyboard when I register for things.

Lastly, it is much easier for me to deal with a sloppily made website than a sloppily made app. I can use extensions, and if need be can open up the network tab to see if the registration request was accepted or not before the website malfunctioned on my end.

You’re right, I should have been more specific.

If you’re already storing your password using pass, you aren’t getting 3 factors with pass-otp unless you store the otp generation into a separate store.

For services like GitHub that mandate using an otp, it’s convenient without being an effective loss of 2fa to store everything together.

I already use pass (“the unix password manager”) and there’s a pretty decent extension that lets it handle 2fa: https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otp

Worth noting that this somewhat defeats the purpose of 2fa if you put your GitHub password in the same store as the one used for otp. Nevertheless, this let’s me sign on to 2fa services from the command line without purchasing a USB dongle or needing a smartphone on-hand.

That’s the proposal to GMO our companion animals like dogs and cats so that they can serve as Geiger-counter + canary-in-the-coal-mine for future humans, right? I don’t remember ever hearing a rendition of it!

You may also interact with countless bots without ever knowing, because creating fake identities is free.

Maybe. Bots don’t seem currently capable of holding a conversation beyond surface level remarks. I think I tend to engage with thought-provoking stuff.

On the off chance that I reply to a bot, it is as much for my reply to be read by other humans viewing the conversation. So I don’t understand how interacting with countless bots is supposed to be such a big downside.

Plus, I don’t see how public/private key pairs prevents endless “fake” identity creation/proliferation. It’s not like you need a government-issued ID to generate them (which, to be clear, still wouldn’t be great -just got other reasons).

Fair, some people value their identity.

To be clear, I’m talking about online identities. In which case, I would argue that if you value it so much you should not delegate it to some third party network. My IRL identity is incredibly valuable to me, which is why I don’t tie it up with any online communications services, especially ones I have no control over.

For average people nothing changes, the app can hold their key for them and even offer email recovery.

…so then the app can post on my behalf without me knowing? And it’ll be signed as if I had done it myself. I don’t understand preferring this if you’re not also self hosting.

That’s something having signatures and a web of trust solves.

But as I wrote in my previous message regarding gpg signing circles (a web of trust), that doesn’t “solve” things. It just introduces more layers and steps to try and compensate for an inherently impossible ideal. Unless I’m misunderstanding your point here?

Besides, you fail to see another problem: Whichever centralized, federated site you use can manipulate anything you read and publish.

I just take that for granted on the internet. It’s true that key-signing messages should make that effectively impossible for all but the largest third parties (FAANG & nation-states). But you still need to verify keys/identities through some out-of-band mechanism, otherwise aren’t you blindly trusting the decentralized network to be providing you with the “true” keys and post, as made by the human author?

Anyway, if you don’t see a need for tools like nostr you don’t need them.

Maybe I’m not expressing myself properly; I don’t see how nostr (and tools like it) effectively address that/those needs.

Sort of like how there was (arguably still is) a need for cash that governments can’t just annul or reverse transactions of, yet bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies I’m aware of fail on that front by effectively allowing state actors (who have state resources) to participate in the mining network and execute 51% attacks.

It weirds me out that most of the arguments for nostr I come across are around how “you can’t loose your identity, it’s just a private/public keypair!”. Maybe I just don’t get banned enough to understand the perspective, but to me the real problem is the content/discussions being lost, not usernames for some corner of the web.

I really don’t care about loosing my identity on a social media website; I’ve found it healthier to view social media accounts on the same level as my customer account at my isp and power utility. When I change ISPs, the old account is closed down and I start up a new one at the other ISP. What’s important to me is the service getting delivered, not that it remembers that I’m the same person from however many years ago. It’s still the same me here in my body, interacting with the web. I know what I need from it, it doesn’t always need to remember who I am (and sometimes I’d rather it forgot or never knew in the first place).

My final point is a bit of a troll, but also kinda serious: how decentralized is it when your identity is “centralized” in your key pair? Loose your keys or loose your password to the key, and your identity is similarly effectively gone. Even worse in this case, no-one can restore it for you. Which is why I don’t tie my identity that much to any online service, especially ones I don’t host. The only thing that truly preserves my identity is the flesh-and-blood body that I inhabit (and even that isn’t fail-proof).

I’ve interacted with GPG signing circles before. So many people are losing access to their keys. So many more are considering some of their keys as compromised. In either case they’re regularly generating wholly new keys, essentially rebooting their “identity” from scratch. When they do so, they always rely on flesh-and-blood interactions to have their new identity verified and trusted by others.

Maybe it’s a question of which circles we’re involved in; mine are already regularly hopping accounts, without being forced to by bans or server outages. I’m used to interpreting the tone & content to recognize “people”, and ignoring usernames. On top of that so many people regularly change their display names on social media for vanity and expression purposes that I can’t reliably use them anyways for recognizing accounts.

Right?

“Protecting vulnerable individuals” - they must mean Putin and Bibbi, not actual victims of political intimidation, sabotage, etc.

This seems right up my alley, as a fan of the Micromachines games and RTS in general.

I’ll try to give it a go when I regain a decent internet landline.

The description given for Pinker’s The Blank Slate made me sceptical at best, so I went hunting for critiques and found this https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759451

Sadly it’s pay-walled beyond a preview of the first page.

For a suggestion of my own, The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. It’s a fun romp through the history of the English language with numerous tangents focusing on this or that quirk, written for those who have never formally studied English or linguistics.

As someone who was always more of a “STEM” person, this book completely upended my relationship to language. I used to think there was “one way” of expressing any given idea, and our job as humans, as it were, is to simply learn all the words and their meanings so as to be as precise as possible when expressing ideas. Nowadays I very much trend to see it the other way around: our use of language shapes the language itself, and our changing needs in terms of which ideas we want to express is what makes language evolve over time.

To put it succinctly, this book helped me view language as a tool that we should alter to suit our needs, not some pre-ordained scripture that we need to memorize and adjust ourselves to.

I would describe it less as “smiting god”, and more as “indirectly rescuing god from the control of the church”. Though even that is a bit simplistic.

The “she destroys magic to save humanity” bit does thematically feel very close to the ending of His Dark Materials.

Same (except the Arab part), this post was highly confusing at first 😅

Still, I think the only way that would result in change is if the hack specifically went after someone powerful like the mayor or one of the richest business owners in town.

It’s such a destructive mindset, and it seems to me like indie games are hopefully on the cusp of re-demonstrating to the rest of the industry why it is so.

Art/luxury products depend on catering to subjective tastes to turn a profit. You need to speak to someone’s perspective or interests, and are competing for their disposable income against all other forms of entertainment. Thus the wider the targeted audience, the harder it is to outcompete the rest of the market on “consumer interest” (no idea if that’s the proper use of the term but it sounds correct for the context), the harder it is to even turn a profit.

Simultaneously, these corporations want an ever-greater magnitude of profit (aka growth). So they decide to target the widest audience possible, while investing as much capital as they can.

That’s already an unstable balance of priorities. As soon as you start conceiving yourself as competing with almost every single other market on the basis of shareholder speculation, in terms of ROI, it’s doomed.

You’re not just shooting yourself in the foot, you’re trying to do a Paul Muad’hib Atreides except because this is reality, not sci-fi, instead of drinking the Water of Life you mixed 10 grams of ketamine, 5 tabs of acid, and a fistful of meth into a blue Gatorade and chugged it in one go. All you end up doing is vibrating in place so hard you begin to slough off flesh and erratically disintegrate, like some sort of sad eldritch horror.

God do I hate corpos sick with capitalism.

To continue the Dune analogy, they really could use some ecology-derived thinking: specialize and find your niche (or help it emerge), and give back to the rest of the ecosystem so that it continues to flourish with you. Monoculture has a negative correlation between scale and sustainability, let alone ROI.