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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • I’ve been around these arguments enough times to see the discussion inevitably get to this point. We dance around the idea of “is it worth it to go vegan or not?” long enough, until eventually someone concedes that “yes it is better to do, but it’s not practical to ask everyone to do it/you can’t get everyone to go vegan/it won’t solve the problem if we go vegan and do nothing else/etc.”

    Convenient that any time an environmental initiative requires even tiny changes to our day to day lives, suddenly we need to look for the solutions vaguely “elsewhere.” I guess let’s ignore the fact that emissions from food alone are enough to push the planet over the 1.5C degree warming threshold for the planet, and that the average US consumer eats an order of magnitude more red meat than could ever be sustainable.

    If you truly think that it’s worth doing, either do it, or admit that you selfishly don’t want to. Don’t try and pretend the climate science backs up your opinions though.

    As an aside, this is basically my goodbye letter to Lemmy, so so probably not going to follow up on this thread. The platform is so small that people can’t help but creep into communities that show up in the overall feed. Say what you will about Reddit, but at least there, spaces created specifically for in-groups (like a space called “vegancirclejerk”) didn’t constantly get commenters from the wider world knocking on the door and starting flame wars in the comments. Like, can there be no space for vegans to just fuck around and post memes in peace?

    Maybe finally I’ll get some peace by logging off and touching some grass. And then eating the grass, bc I’m vegan btw




  • Not OP. I think it’s funny how you’re accusing them of “bullying” when their comments aren’t aggressive at all, just pointing out a practice they disagree with. But somehow your multi-paragraph, raging, sorry, uh… “laughing” comment filled with direct insults and patronizing dismissal, should NOT be considered “bullying.”

    Like, I don’t buy into the idea that anyone can bully someone else in an anonymous Internet forum, outside of doxxing or repeated harassment. But looking at this, one of you is clearly much more aggressive and bothered than the other here.



  • Jewish Federation Los Angeles meanwhile blamed the university’s chancellor for allowing “an environment to be created over many months that has made students feel unsafe”.

    The group demanded that the encampment be cleared and that UCLA meet leaders of the Jewish community.

    Fucking hell, this is such a callous response. In any other situation, the group representing the side that just had masked vigilantes attack peaceful demonstrators would make amends. “These people don’t represent our movement. We disavow them and what they stand for.” And so on.

    I see they’re taking a page from Israel’s book: refuse to apologize, defend unprovoked violence, and blame the victims on top of everything else.



  • Less than half of that plastic litter had discernible branding that could be traced back to the company that produced the packaging; the rest could not be accounted for or taken responsibility for.

    The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just six companies.

    This seems to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course the biggest companies with the most easily identifiable packaging are going to be the ones identified in this study. The majority of the plastic, however, is not, and it’s difficult to tell who produced it.

    The article addresses this as well, mentioning that this is the reason we need traceability, so we can get the true metrics on who is creating and thus responsible for the bulk of plastic waste.

    The big players like Coke and others are obviously very much responsible for a big part of the problem. I just didn’t see people mentioning this part of the study in the comments, so I wanted to bring it up.


  • This new report is the same story all over again. From the linked report:

    Applying this factor to the standardized production results in the emissions from the combustion of marketed products, comprising nearly 90% of total emissions tracked by the database. These are scope three category 11 emissions, corresponding to “use of sold products”

    The vast majority of emissions attributed to these companies, nearly 90%, are those emitted by the consumers who buy the crude oil/natural gas/etc. But news outlets are obscuring that fact in their headlines, which makes it seem like the gas companies themselves are wholly responsible.


  • In my fundamentalist upbringing, people would bring up the “divine mystery” of the Trinity as a kind of proof of the truth of Christianity. As in, the fact that the Trinity cannot be explained must mean that it is beyond our human comprehension, and if it’s beyond our comprehension, it must be divine.

    But like, it’s very easy to see how humans could create the idea of the Trinity, since it’s simply asserting that multiple contradictory things are all true at the same time. Is God the Father separate from Jesus His son, or one and the same? Both, actually!

    Plus, zealots in the church loved "uhm akshully"ing anyone who tried to use a metaphor to explain the Trinity. “The Trinity is like… water, and how you can find water as ice, water, and water vapor in different places.” “UMM actually that’s Modalism, and that’s heresy!”

    Basically the church just assigns an “-ism” for every conventional way to understand or know the Trinity, then insists that it is Unknowable.


  • Even the title of this article asserts that this latest “tragedy” is part of a larger systemic problem than just the incident itself.

    “There seems to be a consistent pattern of utterly reckless behavior,” said Cobb-Smith, who helped investigate the Doctors Without Borders shelling.

    The whole point of this is the lack of accountability for Israel’s repeated “mistakes,” which they have no intention of correcting. The indiscriminate violence is a feature for Israel, not a bug.

    To try and excuse or deflect from Israel’s current missile strikes by bringing up the US’s own missile strikes is an odd choice here. Like, the same people who are calling for Israel to stop its indiscriminate bombardment are largely the same people who were calling for the same when the US was doing it.


  • I’ve seen past discussions on this question, but no definitive answers. We can only guess, as I’m sure Fidelity themselves wants to say as little as possible.

    I’m going to assume that Fidelity is storing a T9 string of your password as a kind of default “security question” prompt for phone calls. So Fidelity would be storing your password hash, and alongside it, storing your T9 string hash. If that is the case, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad practice.

    Given that it’s handled by the automated system, and not by a live service agent, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are hashing your keypad entry and comparing it against a properly salted+hashed T9 string of your password. This is unlikely to expose your credentials during transmission, since this isn’t any worse than entering your password in a form field on the web.

    But what about if Fidelity gets breached, and attackers get the hashes of not only your password, but also the T9 hash? Then, attackers could start trying to crack everyone’s T9 hashes, and using the T9, figure out the length and likely characters of your password. This would make cracking individual passwords faster.

    But if Fidelity had a large scale breach tomorrow, and put out a statement that all of their password hashes were leaked, wouldn’t they already be fucked? Like, they would force a password reset on every account anyways. It’s not like the fact that attackers can crack passwords faster or slower than normal would change how they should respond to a breach where password hashes are stolen. The cat’s already out of the bag at that point.

    TL;DR: As long as they are storing this T9 string separately from your actual password hash, it’s not likely IMO to make or break the security of your account



  • The idea is that generative AI will enable Samsung products to get a better understanding of how consumers use the products – for example, an oven recognizing what is being cooked in it or a fridge recognizing what ingredients are inside. This could allow appliances to understand users’ needs and respond accordingly.

    “Understand users’ needs” being a euphemism for “spy on users’ habits and sell that info to advertisers.”

    We’ve gone full circle: from having a manual for your new appliance, to having a LLM confidently make up some incorrect info about how to use your new appliance.




  • Ok but remember when Republicans made up that Biden was going to “outlaw burgers” with the Green New Deal? And how even the made up idea that the govt would stop subsidizing meat caused half the nation to flip their shit, while the other half went “no don’t be silly, we would never ever touch your precious tendies.”

    Appealing to individuals is important because without shifting the public’s perception of meat as it relates to climate change, the government will be too terrified to enact those kind of changes for fear of getting voted out by the angry, barbecue-loving mobs.

    Until flexitarians, vegetarians, and vegans (I’m vegan btw, just need everyone to know that) become a sizable enough percentage of the voting population, these systemic changes are never going to even be considered by our leaders. So we should keep pressing the importance of these changes to collectively move ourselves closer to that tipping point.



  • The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”

    There’s a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app’s browser is much worse than measuring a true or false “did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted.”

    Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.

    But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.