Have my angry upvote. After I’ve shaken the dust out of my joints.

Those people sound terrible. However, they are teaching you a harsh, but valuable lesson.

Don’t put your happiness in the hands of others.

Another way to say this is don’t allow someone else to control when and if you are happy.

There should be very few people in your life that hold that kind of power over you, and they must earn it.

This seems like this is the main community: https://lemmy.world/c/Unlimited_Freedom_Eternal

That community description is something. Here’s just the first paragraph:

The Name: “Unlimited Freedom Eternal: League of Individuals”, It translates to “INDIVIDUALISTIC YET HIVE MIND GAIEN SUPERORGANISM (Federation)” it means a scalable, high-level alliance of free kings and queens who together create an eternal, self-regulating, super-powerful living force just like a Gaian superorganism at any scale (planetary, cosmic, or multiversal dreams)!

Someone’s put a lot of effort into this. They’re creative at least.

Clicks…m formwlr fxtec the Brand that sctewed US all

What did you just call me?

I recently finished playing through Itorah, a side scrolling action platformer. It’s been on my list for a while. The game is beautiful, the story and art are influenced by Aztec, Incan and Mayan art and culture. There’s no voice acting, but each NPC feels different. There’s little backtracking, and in the areas you do travel a lot there’s usually a new path you can take through it.

I enjoyed my time with the game. The mechanics are fun and varied, and the boss fights are all different and challenging. My playtime was about 20 hours and I didn’t rush it. There are achievements for speed running the game too. I didn’t get all the achievements on my first play through, so there would be more to do for achievement hunters.

Not a scientist, but I’ll try to answer.

Gale Crater is huge. It is 154km (96 miles) in diameter. The meteor that created it would have been massive, and the impact was so big that it caused the surface of Mars to rebound from the hit, causing the mountain in the middle to form. That mountain is called Mount Sharp. The Curiosity rover has been exploring this mountain, and that’s where these samples were taken.

The meteor could have brought water with it, but the impact would have been so violent that it all would likely have blasted away from the crater, and any remaining would have been boiled away by the heat of the impact. That water could have flowed back to the crater eventually, through streams or rivers and possibly precipitation.

The fact that these samples are from high up the side of the mountain do bring the question of if this is a sign of water, how did it get there? I believe this is where the researchers are suggesting that Mars could have been very wet.

But as always, these are only theories. The Rovers can only do so much, and until we can get samples back, or boots on the ground, the researchers are left saying “This is probably why, but we could be wrong.”

Clover Pit fits this perfectly, because you aren’t actually gambling, but in game you are totally gambling.

Agree on the quit, disagree on the insta.

Use the time to apply and interview for a new job. Once you’ve secured a new position, then you quit. Don’t hurt your own finances while you hurt your old company.

And it’s up to you how much notice you give. Worth considering whether to preserve the professional relationships, or torch that bridge.

A Tribble.

Oh no.

Look at this youngin, turning 18 in 2016. Enjoy your knees and shoulders while you can.

2009-2010, you hear about this “Bitcoin” thing for the first time. You remember some old fart telling you about it years ago, but you had no idea what they were talking about and assumed they had mental problems. You decide to download it and start mining it, it doesn’t hurt anything. It just uses your CPU to mine them. You let it run and quickly forget about it. Eventually, you get tired of it slowing your computer down. You have a few thousand coins by now, so you shut the miner down and put your wallet somewhere safe. Then you forget all about it, until about 2021…

Mine Bitcoin. Hold.

Well, fuck.

I wonder why you left out these parts of the article…

“Mark Carney is being elevated much the way Justin Trudeau was… What I am most shocked about is that everybody seems to think that this is some kind of radical departure and that Trump’s belligerents is driving Canada reluctantly into the arms of Beijing. Is there anyone who can explain to me, or tell me, that if Kamala Harris had been elected a year and a bit ago in the American election, do we really think that Mark Carney would have done anything different? This is bread in the bone with these people. It is what they do and what they have always done. Whatever you make of any of this, could you please leave off with this business that Trump is driving us into the arms of China. This is where the Trudeau Liberals unfortunately feel most comfortable. It goes back to Justin Trudeau’s dad. What is happening here is the revival and reconstitution of a lot of protocols and MOUs that were in place during the Justin Trudeau period, the Dominic Barton period, before the Chinese pushed the envelope a bit by kidnapping Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and before the public revelations about the degree to which the Chinese were influencing and monkey-wrenching our federal election system.”

“Mélanie Joly musing about Canada and China building EVs together – this is just the same old story of the Liberal Party of Canada elites turning a blind eye to Trojan horses for Chinese intelligence infiltration, stealing of Canada’s world-leading technology like the Nortel case… Why is Mark Carney moving ahead with these absurd deals? My theory is… Scott Bessett at the White House is saying, ‘Who’s Carney working for?’ Look, he is trying to thread the needle between his patrons, the industrialists in Montreal that I’ve reported have been in bed with the Chinese communist elite, along with Jean Chrétien for decades. He is working with and for them. He is working for a majority. His elbows up rhetoric is still winning, anti-US, anti-Donald Trump. They’ve got a ticket to be a majority government for a long time unless Canadians smarten up. Here is the key: Mark Carney knows that if we don’t get an American trade deal, China doesn’t even care about us anymore – we matter because of our trade integration with the U.S. and the world.”

Gee, I wonder who’s viewpoint this article is trying to push.

Plus quoting The Epoch Times? Yikes.

Honestly, this could be a good thing. It may look like more misconduct is happening, but it also could be the same amount as always. Only now it’s coming to light and being dealt with.

ACAB, but maybe, just maybe, there’s a little bit of light on the horizon?

A number of issues stop that from being possible.

First, a flare is meant to be an emergency system. You send material to the flare because something has gone wrong, like a fire or a leak. There needs to be a clear path from the plant to the flare to make it as easy as possible to remove the material from the plant, so putting a turbine in the path could impede that.

Second, flares are typically used intermittently. Optimally, they would never need to be used at all, but the reality is they will be used. So that turbine would be sitting there on standby, producing nothing most of the time. And then it would suddenly be producing a lot, to the point where there could be too much gas for it to handle and the turbine would have to be shut down.

Third is cost. Gas turbines are expensive to maintain, and a gas turbine that’s sitting there giving you nothing most of the time is even more expensive cost/benefit wise.

I agree with you about the harms social media causes. It’s not helping matters at all, and actively harms people. But so does alcohol. Drinking can relax people, make them feel numb and happy for a short while. Doesn’t help them at all. But we don’t point the finger at alcohol, we say it’s a symptom of a larger problem. In this case I’m saying social media consumption is the same, just a symptom of a larger problem.

And like alcohol, it doesn’t actually help at all. It just takes a person’s mind off their problems for a while. It lets them unplug and just mindlessly scroll Tiktok or Instagram. Say stupid shit on Twitter.

Building community is an answer to this problem. Arguing on the internet is like yelling at the void, where speaking in person tends to make someone think more and be more mindful of what they say, since the repercussions are immediate and right on front of you. And it’s just better for the person too, getting to feel that connection to other people.

The problem though, is that it takes a lot more effort, time, and money to participate in community. The people I’m talking about, simply can’t. They don’t have that time, energy, or money. They can’t afford to meet friends for dinner, even at each other’s homes. They can’t go meet friends at a nearby park because they’re exhausted from work. They can’t go hang out at a friend’s place because of the time commitment. The couple of hours they might have at the end of the day is spent browsing simply because it’s low energy and doesn’t cost them anything more. It’s the only thing that lets them unwind, or unplug, or blow off some steam.

I think the answer is to have the community meet these people where they are. That’s a huge undertaking though, which is probably why we haven’t seen very much of it yet. But it’s going to be sorely needed.

You’re wrong about about what’s causing the apathy and disinterest. It’s not being caused by phones and tablets, social media addiction, or doomscrolling. Those are symptoms of the real problem.

That 22 year old cashier is zoning out because that’s their 2nd or 3rd job, and they’re exhausted. Those folks who refuse to watch the video? Some of them simply can’t, because they’re burnt out from just trying to survive. Those cynical kids with no hope for the future? After 2 recessions and a pandemic, that’s kept them out of the jobs market, I can’t blame them.

A lot of people are struggling to survive. Struggling to ensure they can keep a roof over their head, struggling to afford groceries, struggling to afford that car they need to get to the 2 or 3 jobs they work.

The cost of living is ridiculous now, and wages are stagnant. A large amount of people are simply surviving. All their energy is going to getting their basic needs met, and not all are able to meet those needs. They can’t spare the attention to care about the rest of the world, when they are worrying about which bill to pay and which can wait. Or how to keep that car running just a bit longer until they can get it fixed.

Trump and his goons are absolutely taking advantage of this too. Don’t fight back, or we’ll make things worse. Argue with us and we’ll take away that benefit you’re using to survive. So you’re absolutely right when you say something has to be done. And the sooner, the better. But understand that for those folks we are talking about, they won’t be able to help. Not yet. Unfortunately, things will have to get worse before they are forced to act. And not “ICE is killing more people” worse. It’ll be “I’m getting evicted, I can barely afford to eat, and a lot of people I know are the same.”

Time to warm up the popcorn machine.

Do you really think that there won’t be multiple models even if the bubble bursts? The “best” models are from China and are open source. “We” don’t control China at all! So I don’t see this as likely.

There likely will be a few models remaining when the dust settles, but considering the sheer cost, scale, and power requirements of the data centers the current ones need, I could see one company buying up the rest when the bubble crashes. I don’t want this to get political, but the models coming from China are incentivized to follow the government’s policies regarding information control. They already answer certain questions with government sanctioned answers, or outright refuse to answer. I don’t see them remaining open source for long, and their datasets even less so.

What I DO have an issue with is Mozilla turning its users into training fodder for the AI companies - instead of just building that private AI they keep jawboning about.

This is a fair concern. I don’t use the AI chat bots, and I try to not use the AI answers that pop up with searches. And I refuse to use the generative AIs. But I’m a minority it seems. Thousands of people use these AIs everyday, many of them by choice. So the real question becomes, do we want them using browsers like OpenAI’s new browser, that will likely mine everything they do for their datasets? Or do we want a browser that can limit what these AIs can scrape up, like Firefox?

We’re losing the battle against AI. The amount of people using it keeps growing. Just look at the people using Grok to argue with each other on Twitter. Or the students getting ChatGPT to write their essays. We need to build alternatives that aren’t controlled by billionaires, massive corporations, and venture capitalists. But that’s going to take time. And until we get there, we should be mitigating the damage as best we can, by giving privacy-focused alternatives when using AI.

These aren’t great choices. But if I have to choose between them, I’d rather back Mozilla.

Why not both? (I know lots of folks will hate this take, but please hear me out.)

Because let’s be real: AI is not going away. Yes, we’re all waiting for the AI bubble to bust. And I really want it to, these companies are getting so terrible. But when it bursts, AI isn’t going to disappear. It will condense down to a few companies, or even just one. Do you want one company controlling all the AI out there? Controlling all the answers AI gives? Saying how you or others can use it?

Mozilla claims they want to develop responsible AI. They say they want to make their AI private, and work on-device. I believe we should be encouraging this, so that we don’t end up with control of AI in the hands of Google, Meta, or Musk.

We need alternatives, badly. Because AI is here to stay, no matter how much we hate it. This Pandora’s Box has already been opened, and things aren’t going back.