chaogomu

Yup, kbin for the win.

Just wish it had a mobile app…

I love the odd artifacts.

Dude has both hands in his pockets, but also one hand holding a bird wing, that’s also somehow his other-other hand.

A quick search of those golf pictures says that he might just be that fat.

I’ve actually seen this. I live in an area where people used to have a thicker accent.

Now everyone seems to have blended into sounding similar to the sort of West Coast TV accent.

Another bonus of that community, actual discussions about the shows in the comments. Well, sometimes.

I automatically block most meme communities, there’s almost never anything worthwhile to them, just pointless nonsense.

I do admit to keeping one or two of the really niche ones around, like risa@startrek.website

Yes

We know the harms of alcohol, they are different than the harms of tobacco. They should not be regulated the same. This article misses that completely.

I just didn’t list out the harms of alcohol, or how they’re regulated, because I thought everyone knew.

While alcohol is a carcinogen, it only accounts for something like 3% of cancers deaths, mostly paired with liver disease. Hell, breathing air in a city causes more cancer deaths than alcohol.

This whole article reads like a modern temperance movement, trying to stamp out vice by comparing one harm to another, despite how different the harms are.

We know the harms of alcohol, they are different than the harms of tobacco. They should not be regulated the same. This article misses that completely.

Again, you’re ignoring the fact that the entire biosphere experiences co-evolution, This is why an invasive species is a problem. It was not part of the evolutionary arms race in that environment. It means that the highly specialized attacks that the plants and animals have against each other, might not work at all against the invader.

The billions of years of coming up with ways to make a living there, is actually billions of years of coming up with attacks specialized to exploit weaknesses in each other.

Take viruses as an example. They are often highly specialized to attack specific protein clusters on the outside of cells. Now, sometimes, through some random mutation, they can attack a slightly different protein structure and jump to a different host species, where they run rampant.

That said, alien viruses would likely not be an issue to either side. They’re too specialized. Bacteria, on the other hand, that might pose a problem. But can be compensated for.

But other than that. Humans are very good at being an invasive species. We cheat. If there is anything edible on the planet, we’ll find it. And the planet wouldn’t know what hit it.

Again, the only way the planet’s biosphere could keep us out, is if it was fundamentally incompatible. Like if it had an atmosphere without oxygen, or if every plant and animal had lead or arsenic in their biochemistry.

A new biosphere often has zero resistance against an invasive species.

All those tricks that the local biosphere have are targeted against other parts of the biosphere. It’s called the co-evolutionary arms race. Prey species get better at defending themselves, and predators get better at targeting weak points in their prey. Predators can become super specialized. And in this specific case, herbivores can be considered predators to plant species.

An invasive species slips in when there is no local predator to eat them. Often because no predator can adapt to the new invasive species.

To back this all up, just look at the history of humanity transporting plants and animals all over the place and fucking shit up, all because we figured out the absolute best defense against our own predators, being too fucking smart for our own good.

The only way an alien biosphere could defend itself against us is if the planet it was on had an excess of heavy metals or other poisonous elements like arsenic that became a part of the biosphere itself.

As long as the atmosphere is roughly similar, the native biosphere would have very little defense against us. Sure, some of the defenses that local plants and animals developed against each other might cause issues, or they might not.

We would be an invasive species on the grandest scale. A completely foreign biology would maybe have useful nutrients, or maybe not. That would be the key, but the periodic table will be the same everywhere, and chemistry being what it is, we’d probably see similar molecules, at least the simple stuff. Basic hydrocarbons and such.

The complex biochemistry would be vastly different. That could trip up human explorers.

I’d not trust transporters, but replicators would be great. If I had replicators, I’d open a replicator restaurant, then hire a few chefs to just cook random stuff all day to scan and then give out to the guests.

Maybe I’d travel around the world, scanning the best and freshest ingredients. But I’d travel by shuttle, not transporter.

Buried in this very report, they note that Instagram and Twitter have vastly more (self generated) child porn than the Fediverse. But that’s deep into section 4, which is on page 8. No one is going to read that far into the report, they might get through the intro, which is all doom and gloom about decentralized content.

Since the release of Stable Diffusion 1.5, there has been a steady increase in the
prevalence of Computer-Generated CSAM (CG-CSAM) in online forums, with
increasing levels of realism.17 This content is highly prevalent on the Fediverse,
primarily on servers within Japanese jurisdiction.18 While CSAM is illegal in
Japan, its laws exclude computer-generated content as well as manga and anime.

Nope, seems to be the one. They lump the entire Fediverse together, even though most of the shit they found was in Japan.

The report notes 112 non-Japanese items found, which is a problem, but not a world shaking issue. There may be issues with federation and deletion orders, which is also an issue, but not a massive world shaking one.

Really, what the report seems to be about is the fact that moderation is hard. Bad actors will work around any moderation you put in place, so it’s a constant game of whack-a-mole. The report doesn’t understand this basic fact and pretends that no one is doing any moderation, and then they add in Japan.

The report (if you can still find a working link) said that the vast majority of material that they found was drawn and animated, and hosted on one Mastodon instance out of Japan, where that shit is still legal.

Every time that little bit of truth comes up, someone reposts the broken link to the study, screaming about how it’s the entire Fediverse riddled with child porn.

I seem to remember a guy being convicted for possession of child porn, and the very much adult porn star actually came to his trial to testify in his defense… I’ll see if I can find a link about it, but that will be some risky searching.

They ditched the “don’t be evil” years ago. Now it’s “As many ads as possible”.

I hear that they can cover up to 80% of a user’s visual field without inducing seizures.

We should be breaking up these companies, or at least taxing them and billionaires directly, and then spending that money on things to better the populous as a whole.

Link taxes just prop up legacy media outlets, because those are the ones who cut a deal. The small, local news then dies an even faster death, because it’s too much hassle to track the payments to them under this onerous link tax.

This is the reason why these asinine link taxes are pushed for by massive media organizations, because they see it as a way to prop themselves up by punishing big companies for sending them traffic. The side effect is that this hurts the open internet, making everything shitty for end users. Congratulations Canada, you did it, you made Facebook pay*

*Facebook has never had to actually pay these link taxes, they starve the newspapers out a bit and then cut a backroom deal that is basically no link tax for the large publishers, and far fewer local newspapers from that country represented. This benefits the large publishers nicely, even if they aren’t getting free money for Facebook sending them traffic.