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What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?
  • An important part of that process that needs mentioning is that when the mothers are convinced by Nestle to feed their babies formula instead of their breast milk, their bodies will stop producing the milk before the baby is weaned from it.

    So Nestle literally endangers babies' lives just to sell more baby formula.

  • It's called attaining divinity
  • In case the "dim" comment isn't a joke, as I recall it's short for "dimension", as in you are specifying each variable's dimension in the computer's memory. Source: some "intro to programming with vb6" book I read like 15 years ago at this point.

  • What to do when a giant company refuses to honor a GPL claim?
  • Not necessarily cash, but definitely a bit of luck. Some lawyers, if they think a case is guaranteed to go your way, will do the work for free in exchange for receiving a portion of the damages the final judgement will award you. Even rarer, some lawyers care enough about some issues on a personal level that they'll work for free, or reduced rates, on certain cases.

    In this case, I'm not sure there are any damages whatsoever to award to OP - a "win" is forcing the company to abide by the GPL, not pay up money. The EFF and the FSF, as others have brought up, are probably the best bet to find lawyers that would work on this case for the outcome instead of the pay.

  • EU elections 2024 live: Emmanuel Macron dissolves French parliament and calls snap elections after huge far-right gains
  • He called during his televised speech to get rid of the "ruckus causers", separately from the far right.

    The current largest leftist party had (until last night) close to a third of Parliament, and have a reputation of loudly contesting shit they don't stand for.

    I really don't think Macron's intention is to give them a chance at more votes. If anything, he's hoping this forces leftist voters to move towards the center, seeing as how his own party barely cleared 14% (the largest far right party did over 30, and a smaller splinter party got around 7% on its own).

  • EU elections 2024 live: Emmanuel Macron dissolves French parliament and calls snap elections after huge far-right gains
  • My cynical take: he wants to let the far right win the legislative elections while he still has close to 3 years left in his term.

    He thinks this will "show" their electorate that voting far right doesn't get you what you want.

    At the same time, he can take advantage of the media bashing the leftist party has been getting for their vocal opposition to Israel's actions since October 7 2023, and run them out of Parliament. At least, it's a gamble he's willing to make.

    He is just as much of a clueless, egotistical liberal as David Cameron was, so your analogy is sadly pretty accurate.

  • Solar modules deployed in France in 1992 still provide 75.9% of original output power
  • According to Our World In Data (which claims to use the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy from 2023 as a data source), that waste is from producing around 70 TWh each year:

    That only covers around a third of Switzerland's energy consumption over those years. Furthermore, Switzerland is a small mountainous country with decent access to hydropower (making up around a third of its needs over the same years). They are not necessarily representative of the waste that would accumulate from a more agressive switch from fossil fuels to nuclear across the world (which is what we're talking about, if I'm not mistaken).

    France is about 10 times larger in surface area and according to the same source, consumed/produced over 1,000 TWh of nuclear energy each year:

    And officially has still has no place to put the high-energy waste (source - in french), leaving it up to the plant's owners to deal with it. There is an official project to come up with a "deep" geological storage facility, but no political will seems musterable to make that plan materialize beyond endless promises.

    I should mention that I'm not super anti-nuclear, and I would certainly rather we focus on eliminating coal and oil power plants (and ideally natural gas ones as well) before we start dismantling existing nuclear reactors that are still in functioning order.

    That being said, there are other problems with nuclear moving forwards besides waste management. The main one that worries me is the use of water for the cooling circuits, pumped from rivers or the sea. Not only do open cooling circuits have adverse affects on their surrounding ecosystems, as the planet gets warmer and the temperature swings during the hotter seasons become more pronounced, the power plants will become less efficient. The water going in will be at a higher temperature than it is today, and thus will absorb less energy from the nuclear reaction itself.

    Overall, I don't trust our current collective responsibility as a species to manage our current forms of nuclear production. Russia sent its own troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to dig trenches in contaminated soil last year, and they allegedly recognized last week that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is now "unsafe to restart" because of the military activity in the region.

    The world has not experienced generalized warfare with nuclear power plants dotting the countryside; WW2 ended around a decade before the first nuclear power plants were up and running in the USSR, the UK, and the USA.

    Not to mention how few European countries have access to uranium on their own soil/territory. Of course, most of the rare earth metals used in photoelectric panels and windmills aren't found there either, but as least with "renewables" they are used once to make the machinery, not as literal fuel that is indefinitely consumed to produce power.

    I don't know enough about thorium-based reactors nor molten salt-based reactors to go to bat for them instead, but they seem like a more promising way for nuclear to remain relevant.

  • Tourist finds water pipe at source of China's 'tallest waterfall'
  • I know its a bit cliche, but cultural differences? I've heard of "the concept of face" / saving face being a greater factor in how the government goes about things in some East-Asian countries than what us Americans and/or Europeans might think necessary.

  • A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch
  • Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first (especially for a procedure like signin-up) is beyond me.

    You may or may not have heard this before, but the app is not the instance is not the platform. I registered both my Mastodon account and this Lemmy account via their respective instance websites. I used mastodon in the browser for literally over a year before installing an app for it on my phone.

    Apps are alternative front-ends to the fediverse, even "official" ones.

    "Basic stuff" is very weird to read for me when many of the internet services I have accounts for don't have apps - and I would rather they never make an app for it. My electricity bills, my hosting costs, my home internet, all are done through web pages that I can access from any internet-connected device, unlike an app.

    Not to mention I appreciate being able to type things on a bigger screen and physical keyboard when I register for things.

    Lastly, it is much easier for me to deal with a sloppily made website than a sloppily made app. I can use extensions, and if need be can open up the network tab to see if the registration request was accepted or not before the website malfunctioned on my end.

  • YSK: lemmy.ml is managed by tankies, and lead lemmy developer is a tankie
  • I didn't necessarily think you were being sarcastic, but I appreciate the clarification.

    You're correct, that was a rather shallow comparison for me to make.

    I don't think raw upvotes give the full story either. I'd be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.

  • YSK: lemmy.ml is managed by tankies, and lead lemmy developer is a tankie
  • The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.

    The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.

    The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody. a screenshot of the first page of stats for lemmy on fedidb.org. The collective stats across all servers is 391,326 total users and 45,189 monthly users. The individual servers shown are (in order): lemmy.world, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, hexbear.net, lemmy.dbzer0.com, feddit.de, lemmygrad.ml, programming.dev, lemmyblahaj.zone, and lemmy.ca. The user and "status" counts approximately follow a pareto distribution.  lemmy.world has almost half of the total user count and monthly active user count on its own. The notable outlier is hexbear.net, which has 10% more statuses than lemmy.world made by 10% as many montly active users.

    Maybe it's too soon to make such a judgement call, we'll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.

  • How is everyone handling the 2FA requirement for GitHub?
  • You're right, I should have been more specific.

    If you're already storing your password using pass, you aren't getting 3 factors with pass-otp unless you store the otp generation into a separate store.

    For services like GitHub that mandate using an otp, it's convenient without being an effective loss of 2fa to store everything together.

  • How is everyone handling the 2FA requirement for GitHub?
  • I already use pass ("the unix password manager") and there's a pretty decent extension that lets it handle 2fa: https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otp

    Worth noting that this somewhat defeats the purpose of 2fa if you put your GitHub password in the same store as the one used for otp. Nevertheless, this let's me sign on to 2fa services from the command line without purchasing a USB dongle or needing a smartphone on-hand.

  • I am genuinely confused by hexbear's opinion on the Ukraine war
  • I came across raddle.me a few months ago and spent a few nights trawling it without finding anything questionable - though I might just be too ignorant of parts of history to pick up where they fail. It's very anarchist-flavored so while that might not be your preferred brand of communism I think it avoids descending into "deranged". In any case, their faq/about page should give you a better idea than whatever I could write here.

  • AI enthusiasts continue to cause the rest of us to not have nice things: project maintainer shuts down experiment to curtail backlash exacerbated by fan
    github.com I'm confused: what's with the project descriptions at https://pkgx.dev/pkgs/? · Issue #5358 · pkgxdev/pantry

    Sorry if this has been reported elsewhere already, or if this is explained in docs somewhere, but I don't understand the contents you have in https://pkgx.dev/pkgs/. Lets take a few popular project...

    I'm confused: what's with the project descriptions at https://pkgx.dev/pkgs/? · Issue #5358 · pkgxdev/pantry

    The closer I look, the more depressed I get.

    First of all, the entire thing feels off. Quoting one commenter:

    > So this seems to be some kind of universal package manager where most of the content is AI generated and it's all tied into some kind of reverse bug bounty thing thing that also has crypto built in for some reason? I feel like we need a new OSS license that excludes stuff like this. Imagine AI-generated curl | bash installers 🤮

    The bug bounty thing in question apparently being tea.xyz. From what I can tell, the only things actually being AI-generated are descriptions and logos for packages as an experimental web frontend for the registry, not package contents nor build/distribution instructions (thank god).

    Apparently pkgx (the package manager in question) is being built by the person who created brew. I leave it up to the reader's sensibilities to decide whether this is a good or bad omen for the project itself.

    Now we get to the actual sneer-worthy content (in my view): the comments given by a certain user for whom it seems PKGX is the best thing since sliced bread, and that any criticism of using AI for the project's hosted content is just and who thinks we should all change our preferences and habits to accommodate this

    > PKGX didn't (and still doesn't) have a description and icon/logo field. However, from beginning (since when it was tea), it had a large number of packages (more than 1200 now). So, it would have been hard to write descriptions and add images to every single package. There's more than just adding packages to the pantry. PKGX Pantry is, unlike most registries, a fully-automated one. But upstreams often change their build methods, or do things that break packaging. So, some areas like a webpage for all packages get left out (it was added a lot later). Now, it needed images and descriptions. Updating descriptions and images for every single package wouldn't be that good. So, AI-based image and description generation might be the easiest and probably also the best for everyone approach. Additionally, the hardwork of developers working on this project and every Open-Source project should be appreciated.

    I got whiplash from the speed at which they pivot from arguing "it would have been hard for a human to write all these descriptions" to "the hardwork of developers working on this projet [...] should be appreciated". So it's "hard" work that justifies letting people deal with spicy autocomplete in the product itself, but less hard than copying the descriptions that many of these projects make publicly available regardless??? Not to mention the packaged software probably has some descriptions that took time and effort to make, that this thing just disregards in favor of having Stochastic Polly guess what flavor of cracker it's about to feed you.

    When others push back against AI-anything being so heavily involved in this package registry project, we get the next pearl of wisdom (emphasis mine):

    > But personally I think, a combination of both AI and human would be the best. Instead of AI directly writing, we can maybe make it do PR (for which, we'll need to add a description field). The PR can be reviewed. And if it's not correct, can also be corrected. That's just my opinion.

    Surely the task of reviewing something written by an AI that can't be blindly trusted, a task that basically requires you to know what said AI is "supposed" to write in the first place to be able to trust its outpu, is bound to always be simpler and result in better work than if you sat down and wrote the thing yourself.

    Icing on the cake, the displayed profile name for the above comment's author is rustdevbtw. Truly hitting as many of the "tech shitshow" bingo squares as we can! (no shade intended towards rust itself, I really like the language, I just thinking playing into cliques like this is not great).

    My original post title was going to be something a bit more sensational like "Bored of dealing with actual human package maintainers? Want to get in on that AI craze? Use an LLM to generate descriptions for curl-piped-to-bash installations scraped from the web!" but in doing my due diligence I see the actual repo owner/maintainer shows up and is infinitely more reassuring with their comments, and imo shows a good level of responsibility in cleaning up the mess that spawned from this comments section on that github issue.

    0
    Data is Beautiful @lemmy.world Jayjader @jlai.lu
    Graphing Wikipedia Articles by Inbound & Outbound links + "community" detection
    1
    Rust for Lemmings Reading Club - Alternate Slot (18:00 UTC+1)

    Hi all!

    What?

    I will be starting a secondary slot/sessions for the Reading Club, also on "The Book" ("The Rust Programming Language"). We will, also, very likely use the Brown University online edition (that has some added quizzes & interactive elements).

    Why?

    This slot is primarily to offer an alternative to the main reading club's streams that caters to a different set of time zone preferences and/or availability.

    When ?

    Currently, I intend to start at 18:00 UTC+1 (aka 6pm Central European Time). Effectively, this is 6 hours "earlier in the day" than when the main sessions start, as of writing this post.

    The first stream will happen on the coming Monday (2023-03-04).

    Please comment if you are interested in joining because you can't make the main sessions but would prefer a different start time (and include a time that works best for you in your comment!). Caveat: I live in central/western Europe; I can't myself cater to absolutely any preference.

    How ?

    We will start from the beginning of "The Book".

    There are 2 options:

    1. mirror the main sessions' pace (once every week), remaining ~4 sessions "behind" them in terms of progression through "The Book"
    2. attempt to catch up to the main sessions' progression

    I am personally interested in trying out 2 sessions each week, until we are caught up. This should effectively result in 2-3 weeks of biweekly sessions before we slow back down. I'm not doing this just for me, however, so if most people joining these sessions prefer the first option I'm happy to oblige.

    I will be hosting the session from my own twitch channel, https://www.twitch.tv/jayjader . I'll be recording the session as well; this post should be edited to contain the url for the recording, once I have uploaded it.

    Who ?

    You! (if you're interested). And, of course, me.

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)JA
    Jayjader @jlai.lu
    Posts 3
    Comments 83