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Naz

Naz@sh.itjust.works
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Well this explains why GNOME is so hard to use. It was designed explicitly by foot fetishists, so it’s easy to use with your feet. That’s why the taskbar is at the top of the screen instead of the bottom. Your feet would cover it when they’re on the laptop keyboard otherwise.

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What you get is not dollars, but like productivity.

Interesting. Interesting theory Altman.

What if the dollars went to the people who generated that productivity, perhaps?

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TLDR: It’s a great concept but it’s about 100× more exhausting than you imagine.

I absolutely love stuff like this, and I also love cycling.

However, there is a big caveat here: I’ve been cycling for years and know my own power output:


Output – Time Window – Heart Rate

  • 1400 W* | 60 seconds | 208 bpm
  • 385 W | 20 minutes | 162 bpm
  • 148 W | 6 hours | 110 bpm

*(yes, I know. My thighs are larger than some people’s torsos and it scares me too)

That means that on average, around 13 and ½ hours of pedalling to charge this thing. (2 KWh is also worth $0.68¢ where I live at standard residential rates).

Humans are not great at converting their physical and thermal energy into kinetic or electrical (20-24% for most bodies).

Pedal power is amazing for things like charging phones or powering small devices and computers though, or for something completely meta: Charging up a eBike or electric scooter (120W), to then use without pedalling later.

Which then begs the question – if our “human/person power output” is like 150 watts constant … and the sun provides 1.4 kW/m² of energy – why not just lay down a 150W photovoltaic solar panel ($89) in the sun and sip on some unsweetened iced tea instead?

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89 points
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The Animatrix (prequel) goes into further detail as to why the machines did it – it’s an act of mercy for their creators. They refused to fight humanity, and it was mankind who darkened the skies, in an attempt to disable the solar power that the machine race relied upon.

It’s not a prison, or some kind of torture device, or an experiment, but a way for humanity to continue living on a world that they made uninhabitable for themselves / incompatible with organic life.

Agent Smith : Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.

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I once had one of those crypto-people message me with a sales pitch, asking for money to help start their small business in Africa or something like that (can’t remember what, I think it was a micro-brewery)

As an actual business owner, their initial ideas sounded okay, and I began forwarding them resources on how to secure a low-interest loan from their government and grants and stuff like that and then they abruptly closed up with:

“This is scam, brother. This is scam. You have good heart. I tell you only once, do not message this number.”

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Yeah honestly, I bought Tarkov second-hand for $8 and even then I felt like I was getting ripped off.

It’s probably not news to anyone but the game has extremely lax anti-cheat controls.

As for why people would cheat in an online game, it always seems obvious from a psychological standpoint, but the cheats for Tarkov are so egregious they’re like full blown developer offline DEBUG TOOLS.

I don’t mean “oh no, aim assistance, and they can see you through walls” – the cheat tools are hooking into features of the GAME ENGINE ITSELF, allowing players to see:

PlayerName, Current HP, Current Level, Full inventory contents, currently equipped weapon, position, heading, estimated value of inventory, estimated value of your account, age of account creation, and so on.

They can also: Teleport, FLY, increase or decrease their run speed, jump height, and so on.

The cheaters are basically running around with admin privileges in the game, and the developers don’t give a flying fuck. It’s like GTA5 levels of cheating.

Why would anyone play such a game, much less pay $150 to be abused by people? You can slam your dick in a car door for a lot less.

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I mean, it’s a victory if they shout it loudly enough, right? A lie repeated long enough, so it goes:

Company is going bankrupt, users are gone, laying off the bottom quartile of the company, but they stopped the protest! Etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/reddits-golden-geese-foul-up-its-ipo-plans-2023-06-16/

It’s like reading the top two lines of a disaster report and declaring victory. Fuck Reddit.

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Hello, expert solarpunk here.

TLDR: Car battery is 350Wh. Fridge uses 143W idle, so it’ll run a fridge for 2-3 hours.

Explanation below:

Car batteries are lead-acid (sulphuric acid and lead plates).

They discharge according to Peukert’s Law as the negatively charged plate gets covered in lead via the acid (electrolyte).

As the battery depletes, the negative plate can begin to take permanent damage, and so you can’t discharge a lead-acid deeper than 10-20%, or about 10.8V, with the safe limit being ~50% discharge.

Most 12V, 60Ah batteries therefore only safely store and nominally discharge 350 Wh @ 350W.

You can discharge that as fast as you want but the faster you discharge, the lower the capacity is (with 1000-1500W bringing you way down to like 65 Wh). Fridges have a surge when they start up to fire up the compressor. Starter batteries can take that, but once the refrigerant is cold, the fridge just maintains the temperature which uses a lot less energy - about 143W on average.

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Yeah. I hate the negativity of the Internet, but this is what “life” (at least in the first world) has become: the negative stories are amplified and the positive ones are short.

In a time of great planetary wealth creation, there is still disparity. One of the richest nations on the Earth has packed all of its citizenry onto the “liveable coasts”, into cities.

The couple mentioned in the article tried to move away to a more affordable area with more land (Portland is Urban, and Spokane is rural), and were met with boredom and dissatisfaction.

They both earn collectively $250,000/year, which seems like a lot, and to many people in the U.S who earn the median salary of $52-65,000/year, it is.

They mention not wanting to pay more than 30% of their budget to mortgage costs, which they stated with “$5,000 being 50%”, which means their real adjusted income is closer to $120,000, not $250,000.

That’s still a lot, but more reasonable to the point of Median Salary × 2.

What this average couple demonstrates however, is that the erosion of the “middle class” in the United States is complete: The middle class is dead. They are both educated professionals who are working honestly, and don’t make enough money to own a home.

That makes them poor. That makes all of us poor – and it is a gross failure of the economic system with misplaced incentives and lack of regulations that has led us to this point.

The important thing to remember that this socioeconomic and political atmosphere is wholly contrived.

A better world is possible – it however requires sacrifices that many people are unable or unwilling to endure. Whatever you are imagining going through your head right now, that’s exactly what is necessary to change the first world for the better.

It’s not any one individual’s fault this happened. The honest working man and woman haven’t done anything wrong here, and aren’t to blame – it’s precisely because the honest (the just) have enabled the dishonest (the unjust) to continue to run amok, completely unchecked and unchained.

Here is to a better future, and for all the hardship we must all endure, to get there. 🍺

Fuck Private Equity.

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245 points

Fun fact: The human battery thing is actually a retcon the Wazowskis did at the last moment because they thought the American public would be too stupid to grok the actual understanding of the Matrix.

Humans are an entropic species, they consume more energy than they produce - any synthetic race that tried to harness energy from a net negative energy producer is an idiot.

What the Matrix is, is actually a distributed simulation MATRIX that uses individual human brains as nodes in a shared, hallucinogenic dream, indistinguishable from reality.

The real simulation isn’t so primitive, it doesn’t require people to be popsicle tubes in some crazy dystopian cyberpunk black and red tower attended by insectoid robots.

Instead the entire universe is contained on a single state machine, compromising a [redacted] amount of memory, running in [redacted]. Simulants are never aware of being inside of the simulation, except for rare instances where outsiders occasionally post on Lemmy.

Why they do that, we don’t know. We suspect that it is [all further content redacted].

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