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


  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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…



  • If it’s a publicly traded company the answer is that they likely don’t believe in anything. They just do whatever the leadership believes would generate most profit, since that is what shareholders (usually) care about most.

    If appearing to support progressive goals gets people to spend money in the store, then that is something that makes sense for a company like this to do. But if they stand to lose more money than they gain, for instance through boycotts, they will drop the pretence pretty quickly.

    Personally I see the stance such companies take more like a reflection of general acceptance in society as a whole. If a company promotes progressive values then that would indicate that society as a whole is on average leaning more progressive.
    Similarly, if companies stop supporting these values that indicates a worrying trend with regards to societal acceptance.

    Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that the company itself (as an entity) really believes in anything.

    (Note: This doesn’t hold for companies that aren’t publically traded. If there are no stockholders to please the leadership can let their personal view affect the company’s policy quite a bit)



  • That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)

    While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.

    I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.


  • Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.

    Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
    If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.

    While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.