Compare this:

Tell me why Armistice Day was more important than Veteran’s Day is.

I aim to engage thoughtfully with this topic while noting that the relative importance of these observances can vary based on personal and cultural perspectives.

Armistice Day, established to commemorate the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, held unique significance as it marked humanity’s hope that WWI would truly be “the war to end all wars.” The original spirit was focused specifically on peace and the prevention of future wars. When the armistice was signed, there was a profound sense of collective relief and determination to ensure such devastating conflict would never happen again…

To this:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

I find the second one more entertaining, more pleasant to read. If you want to call it that. I know translation is different from coming up with new text. But look again at the lyrics and the language in the second one.

I’m not trying to tell you that you’re wrong for wanting to read things that aren’t in English, or that there isn’t a place for machine translation so the information can get conveyed. I’m just saying that passing anything of value through this filter, and then presenting it as something for people consumption, is a bad idea compared with the other way.

It’s not enough to be able to put the words in the right order.

You have to know why they need to be said. Otherwise, it’s a big waste. Just throw the book in the bin and go spend some time outside instead.

Yeah. If there’s an explicit list, then it’s easy to extrapolate, too, if some source comes in that’s not on the list. I’m sure there will be little disagreements about particular sources, but it’s easier if there’s a clear guideline to follow.

It might be a good idea to make explicit rulings on some of the borderline sources.

If it were me, I would ban ScienceAlert, for example. “A Physicist Reveals Why You Should Run in The Rain” or “NASA Reveals Spooky Eyes in Space, And They’re Staring Straight at You.” They have a lot of good articles, too, but some of it is clearly just stuff for clicks. Psypost is also a little dubious. Maybe if it’s something a scientist in that field would ever read and take seriously, including reliable journalism sources that are talking about science, then it’s good, but if it would be viewed as pop-science clickbait, then we need to talk about it.

These are just ideas. I’m just saying that clarifying by name some of the things near the border, maybe after checking with the community, might be good.

I clicked through to the Nature article, and it sounds like about half the plastic gets used for making energy and exhaled as carbon dioxide, with the other half getting pooped out as microplastics. I’d call that progress. It’s not the end goal, but it’s a good tool with some potential, is I think what they are saying.

I’m confident that it will happen, these things just take time. There’s enough energy floating around bound up in plastic polymers, and the chemistry is simple enough, that something will learn to make use of it. 100 years is just way too short in evolutionary time for it to happen on a large scale.

Life is incredibly resilient. It’s been through way worse than us and it’s done fine.

The right conditions for any single species to keep existing in a safe and comfortable place, like the friendly green-blue paradise we were born on, are heartbreakingly fragile.

Not true.

We found that mealworms on the polystyrene-bran diet survived at higher rates than those fed on polystyrene alone.

While the polystyrene-only diet did support the mealworms’ survival, they didn’t have enough nutrition to make them efficient in breaking down polystyrene.

Many of the ones fed only polystyrene for a month did survive, they just fared poorly as with any organism that’s eating only one substance for an entire month. But they did live, which is pretty impressive.

They have gut bacteria that can break down polystyrene for nutrition. They just can’t eat only polystyrene and nothing else and thrive. It’s mostly an area of research because they want to use the bacteria in processing waste, not that the mealworms are going to be the answer as-is.

Mastodon is your coworker who’s honestly well-meaning and kind, but seems to have fits of upset for seemingly no reason at all and random beefs and drama with people that arise from nothing at all. She’s not very good at her job, but she can get it done, and she seems like a sincerely good person, which is enough that people like her.

Misskey is the employee who’s incredibly efficient, but has her own system that no one else can make sense of or follow. You have to just let her do things the way she wants to do them, but it all works. She does not hang around with anyone, just comes in and does her thing.

Bluesky is the guy who is always talking buddy-buddy while either wasting time or asking people for things, blows coke in the bathroom, is constantly hyping himself up. He seems to be very qualified, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is an act, and he’s also clearly a huge piece of shit. For some reason he is wildly popular with everyone.

You didn’t ask, but Bonfire is the IT guy who seems to live in his windowless office, wears T-shirts to work, speaks to no one, and is personally responsible for about 40% of the company’s products and services. Most people have no idea who he is.

The chorus of people who just now learned something new and were so excited they left a comment is absolutely wonderful.

I like how everyone else is saying, “Oh sweet! Look at this thing I just learned today!”

And then this guy is over here with “Well aktually espresso is totally different from drip coffee and so this totally unrelated thing Wikipedia was saying is all wrong I’m so smart.”

I think Lemmy needs some kind of daily “smart person contest” to draw off the energy that otherwise gets spent on trying to find someone to prove wrong in the comments at the expense of everything else. Lord knows, I need one of those too.

All sounds reasonable. I think I just had an instant eye-roll reaction to the crack about “shitty admins” as the reason for your unusual configuration and making me do extra work to talk with you, and decided not to bother. But sure, if you want to talk with me I’ve got nothing against it.

Borg borg borg

You can combine it with a FUSE mount of the Google Drive, I’m not sure if that works but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.

How long did you wait? Sometimes it takes some time for things to get federated.

As long as someone is subscribed to it from your home instance, it should get there, though.

Edit: A word

A lot of Lemmy mods, especially on Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world, see themselves as arbiters of what people are and aren’t allowed to say.

It’s very weird. It is the Reddit model that they’ve inherited, and you can avoid it to a certain extent by just avoiding those communities and instances that tend to do things that way. But I think at the end of the day that this model of moderation is simply always going to have this failure mode attached to it. It’s a silly thing for anyone to agree to who is an adult who can speak their mind unmonitored by a chaperone who is approving or banning each message like some sort of schoolmarm overseeing the class discussion and ordering someone out if they get out of line. We only put up with it because most mods are fine, the damage is slight most of the time, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

I wrote more on the topic in this exact community a while back if you want to read. I plan to write up a part 2 which includes some guesses for what could be done about it. If you want, I can send you a note when it’s written.

They’re not allowed to be collaborating with people who work for certain Russian companies. It’s not a question of security, it’s a question of US law requiring US entities to punish through non-cooperation certain companies that are assisting in the war effort or whatever.

It might or might not be fair, but it isn’t up to the kernel developers, it’s a legal requirement for them.

Because cheaper. And now, I know why.

Any man who must say, “I am hilarious,” is no true hilarious.

It’s basic economics in its ugly application.

Usually, the people who are buying stuff come in different tiers: The people who want to pay the least at all cost, people who are careless enough to get fleeced out of a few dollars for the same crappy product if paying less is difficult, and people who are willing to pay a premium for really good stuff. There’s an art to structuring your service to catch all of the tiers, and make sure that they’re all going to pay the highest price they will accept, and I think “basic economy” is a new technological development in drawing a more effective distinction between tiers 1 and 2.

What makes it ugly is that they’re designing deliberately punitive features into the service to push people up into tier 2 who would otherwise be going on Kayak and just clicking the “cheapest” button. If you have any willingness to pay $40 more, they want it. They’re going to put you to the test a little bit, to make sure that you’re committed to the lowest price, and then if so they’re going to punish you a little for it, while still taking your money.

American and United are now both on the no-fly list for me, I think. I may have to see what airlines are decent, when you fly them one tier up.

Preemptive defederation, along the same lines as, “You can’t fire me, I quit!”?

I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. I’m was asking because another of their communities is coming up for posting in my community tool. Thanks for the link.

We’re not federated because it’s just too much drama and not enough reward. There are too many instances, many of them inactive, lots of people uploading sketchy shit which federates across, it’s impossible to keep tabs on everything and lots of resources go into hosting that bloat which nobody here would care about. Fediverse politics are also cancer and every shitty admin thinks they’re important somehow.

I’m not opposed to federating selectively, with your instance for example. I mostly care about knowing that you actively admin it and I don’t have to worry about dodgy content making its way across here - if that’s the case and you’re keen, let me know.

My God.

Since they’ve decided I’m a shitty admin, I’ve instructed the community posting tool to skip over their stuff, and I consider the matter closed. I wish them luck.