consequence of the terminally-online brain rot

Disagree. Its a consequence of corporations loudly proclaiming their support for groups when it cost nothing (think Black History Month here in the US). Corporations like to use a lot of empty marketing talk about societal issues when they can get away with it and ppl have decided to fight that by pushing companies to actually takes stands. Also, corporations here in the US have much larger voices than individual (and again this is because of the corporations’ own actions), so some ppl see it as a way they can actually have an influence on their govt.

Web 1.0 means no interactivity outside of forms (client to server request<-> response cycle). Web 2.0 was the label used when sites started gaining interactivity, using Javascript.

Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox

Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization

This is from the Mozilla release. The second quote does say “Firefox Organization” and not “Firefox”, but it seems clear they are planning on integrating AI into Firefox.

But, I’ve reread @NotSteve_'s comment and they were saying the funding earned from AI could be put into Firefox, not AI itself. NotSteve wasn’t claiming that putting AI into Firefox would bring in more funding, only that AI could be a separate source of revenue. So my question is moot.

how will putting AI in Firefox get them funding?

Again, both of those are older, more established instances so its more likely they are already aware of any given user.

And a lemmy user probably isn’t the best test for this, because of how lemmy works. If anybody on the instances follows a lemmy community, all posts and comments in that community will make it to the instance. Which means lemmy users are probably spread around the fediverse more than users of other software.

If your instance is already aware of that user, you don’t need the domain. Mastodon.social is the oldest mastodon instance and probably the biggest, so it is aware of a large majority of the fediverse.

If you know the person’s twitter handle, its simple to search for them. People coming from centralized systems, don’t realize that you have to include the domain for fediverse searches to work. I couldn’t just find you by searching for p03locke, I’d have to search for @[email protected].

Also, if my instance has never interacted with you, your profile probably won’t show posts when I find you (though this is a choice and I don’t know why implementations won’t fix it.)

Again, instance blocks makes this more complicated because my instance could block yours or yours could block mine and that would prevent this search from working but the user wouldn’t know that.

Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they’re not familiar with decentralization, they don’t understand what that means. It’s especially weird that they can’t directly join mastodon on the site called “joinmastodon” but have to go to another site.

Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won’t know why.

If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there’s a lot of snags here.

It’s definitely possible. There are quite a few self hosting solutions that have UIs for installing/managing applications. The author is saying we need to make those better.

I use TiddlyWiki via TiddlyPWA. It’s an offline-capable PWA with a very quick sync capability. It works beautifully on my phone and desktop. It doesn’t have folders, but it does have nestable tags, which works really well for me. I don’t think it supports markdown out of the box, but I’m positive you can find a plugin for it. Plugins are crazy simple to install; you just drag and drop a link into you wiki tab and confirm installation.

They are different because most users weren’t aware of XMPP. They weren’t making a conscious choice to use an open standard. The fediverse, on the other hand, has grown specifically because people are seeing the value of an open ecosystem.

When google started removing XMPP support, users weren’t aware and didn’t care (other than losing contact with a few holdouts). If Meta implements AP support and then removes that support or modifies it so that it breaks some of expectations of the fediverse, most users will move to instances that don’t use Meta extensions. Meta can not take your instance or make it use their extensions, so an open fediverse will always exist.

People who say that are generally talking about the signup where you have to pick an instance. And then there’s the worry over which other servers yours federates with. If you isolate your attention to a single instance, then all those worries go away.

The same already happens on the fediverse in regards to mastodon itself. A lot of people discuss the fediverse almost wholly in terms of mastodon.

They used it in a perfectly acceptable and understandable way. The definition you’re describing as sarcastic is an official meaning of the word. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patronize

MOXIE is a Scale Model for a Future Big MOXIE
To launch from Mars, a small crew of human explorers will need 25 to 30 tons of oxygen, or about the weight of a tractor-trailer! To make that much oxygen would require a 25,000 to 30,000 watt power plant. The Perseverance power system only provides about 100 watts, so MOXIE can only make a small fraction of the oxygen that a future “Big MOXIE” would need to make.

In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we’d need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That’s not trivial.

Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.

We can’t breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We’d need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.

But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn’t just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.

The point of books like this is to underline areas where we’re still woefully ignorant to guide future study. This isn’t just complaining. It’s taking stock of what we still need to learn.

You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues?

Scientists catalog what we know and don’t know and try to chip away at the list of things we don’t know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don’t know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don’t know.

The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:

No one has been conceived in low gravity, no fetuses have developed in low gravity, so we simply don’t know if there is a problem. Astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and no one knows how that plays out long term

I was shocked to learn that no one really knows how to construct a long-term habitable settlement for either the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are lots of hand-wavy ideas about lava tubes and regolith shielding. But the details are just… not there.

For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.

Space colonization may happen, but it’s incredibly doubtful that it’ll happen in our lifetimes.

Thanks for pointing out Ladybird. It’s a pretty exciting project. But the author isn’t early in “announcing” anything. This isn’t a press release. He posted on his own blog about a pet project. That’s what the web is supposed to be. Not everything has to be for a big purpose or compete with everything else.

A one-man project starting from scratch is not going to be viable in this day and age.

It’s a pet project; it doesn’t need to be “viable”.

I think this attitude is part of the reason why we have so few browsers. Every time someone tries to start their own browser, even just for fun, a lot of the response is just bitching about how big and complex browsers are and how the effort to start a new one is wasted. It makes it so that people interested in writing their own browser (for fun or profit) are less likely to share about it and probably less likely to pursue it seriously