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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Lemmy is still relatively new, and you grow the audience you nurture.

    A lack of moderation means that racists, bigots, general assholes, etc, will find an easier time settling on this platform.
    And I’ll be honest, if that would be where Lemmy is headed I’m not sticking around to see it turn into that cesspool

    I’m personally quite happy with the level of moderation I’m seeing on lemmy.world. It’s not overly heavy handed, but it seems to generally be applied where it makes sense to apply. Essentially the “don’t be a dick” rules of the forum days of old.




  • People who have a more in-the-middle opinion generally don’t talk about AI a lot. People with the most extreme opinions on something tend to be the most vocal about them.

    Personally I think it’s a neat technology, and there probably exist use-cases where it will work decently well. I don’t think it’ll be able to do everything and anything that the AI companies are promising right now, but there are certainly some tasks where an AI tool could help increase efficiency.
    There are also issues with the way the companies behind the Large Language Models are sourcing their training data, but that is not an inherent issue of the technology. It’s more an issue with incorrectly licensing the material.

    I’m just curious to see where it all goes.





  • Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.

    As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

    • During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
    • During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

    Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.


  • Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
    Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.

    Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:

    • The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
    • The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.

  • My read on this is not as much of a cynical one. I believe the point of surveillance is simply to protect the institution of the state.

    The goal of the state is ultimately the continued existence of that state. Otherwise there really is not that much purpose to the state. Surveillance is a tool to suppress actors (read: terrorists) who might want to undermine that institution.

    In order to determine who benefits from the continued existence of the state, it mostly depends which state you are talking about.
    A state like China exists almost solely to benefit those in power, and thus the surveillance state is used to suppress the citizenry. But a Western democracy, while it also to a certain extent protects money and power, also exists to to benefit the general population.




  • Do you mean the concept of up- / downvoting posts and comments in order to determine a suitable order, or do you mean the tally of all your up- / downvotes being displayed as a number on your profile.

    As for the up- / downvoting, while it isn’t perfect, and it sometimes encourages people to only upvote things they agree with rather than being accurate, it is a pretty good metric to get relevant posts and comments to the top.

    And as for the numerical tally… It’s easily ignored. I didn’t particularly mind it on Reddit, but I also don’t mind its absence on Lemmy.
    Seeing the number go up on my individual posts gives my monkey brain enough of a dopamine boost


  • More like they have an ancient sewage system.

    Basically, if the sewer system gets overwhelmed, for instance if there is a large amount of rainfall in a short time, then the sewage overflows directly into the Seine.
    They have built infrastructure leading up to the Olympics to capture this overflow in storage tanks, but you cannot build infinitely large storage tanks so at some point it will still overflow.

    And 2024 has been a very wet year thusfar, so…


  • To me the idea of “fuck cars” is not so much about cars as a concept, but rather the scurge of car dependency.
    You don’t want a society built around cars to the point that you cannot reasonably live your life without one.

    That said, even in a perfect situation with ample public transit and walkable/cyclable cities everywhere, there will still be people in situations who need a car to get around. And for those people I’d prefer it if they would be driving around in compacts like this or smaller, rather than some of the cross-overs, SUVs and pickups you see today.

    Some people will always need a car, and practical compacts like this would be perfect for that role.