I don’t think I’ve taken emotional damage like this since I discovered what rejection felt like.

Yeah, I’d be uncomfortable, but immortality is immortality.

Now, if the requirement was a daily barebacking by the ultra-rich engineering their cum to be the elixir of immortality, I’d be a little more conflicted.

People say AI start hallucinating bizarre sentences is a problem, but I’m beginning to wonder if it simply gazed too deeply into the internet abyss.

Always nice to know someone appreciates me.

Yeah, I was real excited until seeing the “sign of life”. It’s just like all of the articles saying “Evidence found for the formation of life on Mars!” And then you read it, and they just found signs of water, which is neat, but not that level of headline neat.

There’s a whole geological carbon cycle that occurs without the presence of life, so all this really does is provide a place for further investigation with the upcoming Europa space missions.

Imagine the timeline, Elon never became an asshole, the ultimate pyrotechnic show, fireworks going off, this strange happy man has flamethrowers and a jetpack, behind him a dozen synchronized Falcon 9 rockets take off and engage in a choreographed aerial ballet.

People post videos of it online, because Twitter still exists as a functional platform.

I think it’s pretty apparent you don’t live in the suburbs or outside of a large city lol. Even then, when I lived in Texas the urban sprawl meant walking anywhere was completely off the table, and biking meant sharing 55 MPH roads. Other states have been better, but the issue of vanishing public spaces has been an issue raised since the 80’s (third spaces, if you’re interested).

All that said, even being active in community and spending time with friends, should people not be allowed to watch tv in their downtime? Should we ban the mindless internet browsing, Lemmy?

I mean, that genuinely sounds amazing. Though I’ll note that paying to go places is still an issue for the youth and the poor. When I was in college, and when I lived in California, there was a similar variety of options, though, driving was a necessity in San Diego.

If you’ve ever heard of suburban hell though, that’s pretty much what I was referring to. There’s a small library about a forty minute walk from me, across at least one highway and partially without sidewalks. A ten minute walk to a park that can seat fifteen, there is a scenic bike route, and no buses. And yet it’s a vast improvement over what I saw in Texas.

The loss of unregulated, uncapitalized public spaces is a well recognized phenomenon (also termed ‘third spaces’), one that grew even more pronounced during Covid.

There are, but they’re all entertainment media. Books, television, games, every avenue of entertainment is being steadily hypercapitalized and compartmentalized. Communities aren’t failing because people have entertainment, they’ve fallen apart because the outside world has almost no places left where people can freely gather. You don’t meet your neighbors because there aren’t any sidewalks, because the parks need to be driven to, because downtown has strip malls instead of boardwalks where people can gather.

I grew up hanging out in the Walmart parking lot because that’s the only place we wouldn’t be shooed away. Entertainment is what fills the absence of community, not the cause of it.

“People shouldn’t consume media” is a hot new take I didn’t expect. A call to return to sitting on the porch and aimlessly staring at the neighborhood for hours while sipping on sweet tea and smoking a pipe.

Yeah, I could see the financial value dropping, with businesses less willing to pay as much for harvested data, but I don’t see a point in time where they don’t attempt harvest every last piece of data on the off chance somebody wants it though. Advertisers paid insane amounts of money for targeted information, but even Google’s seen a huge contraction in their advertising revenue.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t frantically trying to harvest data more aggressively (just recently tried to bake it into the internet itself), just that our data is getting cheaper.

I don’t know if that’s quite the right way to frame the complaints. I don’t think that having things to entertain you for free is necessarily a human right (even if paywalling all media is a bleak alternative), but I do think people have a right to be charged a reasonable amount for entertainment. There was a long time where you paid 8$ a month and got access to just about every single movie and tv show that had ever been made in the US.

It was wildly profitable for Netflix, who in turn paid licensing fees to all the owners of their content, and customers were happy, it was great. Then all the cable companies started their own streaming services, licensed media was reclaimed as the garden walls went up, and suddenly comprehensive access to media ballooned from 10$ a month to hundreds . The services themselves got worse, ads started getting inserted into paid accounts, and subscription prices steadily rose across the board.

I don’t think people are declaring that media should be free, but after Netflix almost killed piracy because most people are willing to pay a reasonable amount for reasonable access, a lot of people are understandably unhappy with the streaming industry going from an affordable revolution to cable 2.0 in a single decade.

Mine definitely burned out sometime in the last five years. Used to be so excited for new tech, new features, new consoles, not necessarily to even buy, but just to see what’s going on. Being fair, there was also some crippling depression, but now the new yearly tech release feels exhausting rather than sparking any amount of curiosity. Same with programs, Google releasing something is more of a “what now?” rather than the neat exploration it used to be.

I don’t know, it feels a lot more exploitative than things used to be. Phones cost as much as laptops, all your programs are trying to spy on you better, everything seems to be trying to find the maximum limit for how expensive a thing can be before the line starts going down instead of up.

Yeah, there was a chunk of time where there was some spat going on between them and VPN providers, and whenever I would wind up on an exposed VPN server every single captcha would take over a minute of clicking through different prompts. Happened so frequently for the fastest server that I just switched to Firefox and DuckDuckGo because I couldn’t stand getting hit every single time I googled something. Not just every session, but literally every single search.

The worst was when it would test me for several minutes straight, and then have the gall to tell me to start over again. Google’s really been racing to the bottom lately.

“We all float down here.” 😅

In cities, a lot of the new rental construction is “luxury” because it’s both the most profitable multi-unit housing project, and because it recovers its investment outlay decades earlier than a rental complex that intends to charge near or moderately above the average rent prices. There’s no market incentive for anyone to build affordable housing, unless the government subsidizes it, which is unsustainable and defeats the purpose of affordable housing in the first place.

They don’t have to worry about occupancy as long as there’s a housing shortage, so you’re stuck between living in decades old apartments that have questionable utilities and maintenance, or paying 2-5 times as much to live in an equivalently sized new apartment. One of the cities I lived in was entirely split between old converted buildings (that kept raising their rent) and brand new luxury apartments that would bleed you dry.

Smaller houses would help, but even Tiny Homes are fucking expensive now, with them creeping up to a couple hundred thousand for less than 800 sq ft. Basically, builders wanna build expensive houses for a larger profit margin, corporate owners want prices to rise and strategically buy and sell, and private owners want it to be an investment. With the housing market cooling, and builders slowing new construction to wait it out until demand pushes prices back where they want, we’re basically stuck in a self-regulating purgatory, where housing becoming affordable is something that all the market pressures are pushing against.

I don’t know why I find this existentially horrifying. …Can they be bolded? 😭😭😭

People don’t realize that part of diverging from our monkey ancestry traded a lot of brute strength for dexterity. Chimpanzee’s can weigh as much as an average adult male, but their hand and arm strength is enough to literally tear your face off.

Not joking, there was a lady who made the news because a chimp removed her hands and then all of her facial features. The way muscles insert in their arms and the upper arm/forearm proportions maximize force but reduce the range of motion and fine motor control, but it’s still like fighting a middle schooler with the strength of a couple of adult men. And also that kid’s a an angry cannibal.

Apparently chimps have been seen killing and eating gorillas. Basically, monkeys can be rough, but chimps are scary as fuck. This website almost reads like it’s joking, but all the numbers actually line up and it seems like a legitimate zoology website.

While you

I came in here for this comment. When the choices are “criminal fighting the immensity of the ocean”, “guy named for all the cows and famous for shooting/being shot by other cow guys”, and literal nobility, it’s a solid deal. Of all three, one has the lowest chance of death, highest quality of life, and you pretty much got to do whatever you wanted depending on the era. The law that let you kill offending lower classes for twenty days of house arrest was only struck off the books in the mid 19th century.