Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed with philosophy and history, secondarily obsessed with video games as a cultural medium. Also somewhat able to program.
Hi, the OP this was crossposted from here. The answer is simple: I am using PeerTube Companion, a Firefox add-on that automatically redirects me to my home instance when loading any PeerTube video - so I can easily comment and like and subscribe. So when using the “share” button or copy-pasting the link from the address bar, I will default to posting a link to my instance - in essence, it is the same video, loaded from the same source, federation being what it is.
Oh no, my tastes tell me I am all four on the bottom right, so, basically chaotic evil and neighbours 🤔
Luckily for us, that seems to be some piss-weak nearly-water coffee.
Could that be the common ground for the India-Pakistan conflict to come to an end?
This made me check on how pixelfed has been faring, since I remember them going through a huge boom recently - and to my joy, they still have a very large (for fediverse standards) community, they even rebounded a bit from the initial drop of people leaving after trying it out!
Done and done - it was about time I got an account there anyway.
That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.
That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.
Ah, I know what you are getting at, traditional Chinese medicine was indeed seen as a tool that could be applied without having to immediately import know how from abroad, and it did indeed create a basic, professional network of care that wasn’t there in that way before. I was more thinking of how practices like Feng Shui or the broad umbrella of “traditional Chinese folk religion” and associated beliefs were treated during the cultural revolution, which got some form of “rehabilitation” afterwards, often in a newly interpreted/sanctioned way.
There are definitely similarities, but China has its own fascinating history there, with a lot of traditional beliefs resurfacing as weird, sanctioned versions of themselves after the cultural revolution had mostly suppressed them. I think on average, the administration in China will probably have less “true believers” and more “stuff like this is necessary to maintain societal peace and harmony” opportunists.
But that is mostly speculation on my part and hard to gauge without looking into peoples’ heads.
Sort of, they also had weird currents of esoteric nonsense, like “Welteislehre” for example. Or Himmlers expeditions to Tibet to find the origins of the master race and evidence of supetnatural abilities. They believed themselves to be secular and anticlerical, but they had their own cult with superstitions.
And they absolutely hated some scientists, relativity was a thorn in their eyes, for example, as “Jewish Science”.
Psychopaths, sycophants and grifters vying for power were all very prevalent at German universities and research labs at that time. While Engineering still kind of worked - as it was needed for the war machinery and larger industry - even there, with it being “politically neutral”, there was a brain drain - because education allowing for creative thinking was curtailed more broadly, and many talented minds were killed or displaced or even just disfavoured in favour of more nepotistic choices.
And the myth of “German engineering” being fundamentally way above allied engineering during the war still holds in some circles, when mostly it was about different priorities (like - reliability instead of complex engineering, or the proximity fuse instead of rocketry, or radar instead of jet engines), and even in the spaces where Germans had a leg up on their enemies, it was not a fundamental advantage, but a gap that was being bridged even before German scientists were recruited after the war.
“… plus you all have smallpox now.”
Yeah, Crusader Kings III taught me those existed, and not too long ago, it had me dive into a Wikipedia rabbit hole. They also used shade walls and radiative cooling to create ice during cold desert nights, which then remained long enough to be harvested in the morning and put into well-constructed ice houses like this. Also, wind catchers and Qanats.
So you need a non-vampire judge to enter the house and produce the warrant from inside, got it!
Yeah, I can’t argue with numbers - although when I searched for more of those numbers (because there was no report linked in the article), I am at least somewhat sceptical as of now. Mostly because all the outlets I have seen report on it are… well, not really neutral. This site, too, has a weird amount of AI images and praise of Trump (e.g. like in this article).
So, I had a bit of a look around, and as expected - if only one side reports something, there is usually at least something missing:
For example:
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/expert-reports-say-argentinas-poverty-rate-has-fallen-to-368.phtml
Meanwhile the ODSA (Observatorio de la Deuda Social Argentina) poverty watchdog of the UCA Catholic University voiced that although the projected indices had reached similar levels to the previous year for the third quarter of 2024, the consumer capacity of households was reduced by the higher costs of basic services such as electricity, water, gas and transport, among others.
Unlike the line traced by the total shopping-basket, the measurement of multidimensional poverty does not only focus on family earnings but also the lack of access to basic sources of welfare in from one to six dimensions.
“The current panorama shows an aggravation of the situation in this sense - multidimensional poverty (measured as income plus one lack) increased inter-annually from 39.8 to 41.6 percent and within that figure structural poverty (three wants or more) also rose from 22.4 to 23.9 percent,” they alerted.
This is a massive reduction, but it is a reduction from a massive surge:
So - seems like there is at least some cherry-picking and reporting early projections as fully manifested facts going on here, but the recovery itself is still good news for the people actually living there, of course. I’d like to wait for more fully-fledged analysis reported by different outlets than this. How likely is this to be sustainable? How many additional factors will be at play? Even if Milei’s reforms turn out to be a miracle of a new way to “do austerity right” - I will only believe that if there is better analysis than this, because Libertarian-adjacent outlets praising this, sometimes with misrepresenting data, like, e.g. this graph I came across:
(Milei came to power at the end of 2023, as a reminder, so the graph is coloured in a deliberately misleading way)
Those kind of reporting sadly does not spark confidence for me.
Also, one can lead to the other. If you catch the right fish with a scam, they may just unwittingly give you a way in to an institution. Only the latter would make the news, though.
I had been wondering when the first big campaign-style mod for the game would hit, stoked to hear more! As a side note: I get why, but I’m still kind of sad that projects like this seem to use Discord as their main space.
The way I understand it, the whole “paradox” is more: If we aren’t the first culture-producing life, and if technological life is not an exceptionally rare occurence, and if technological life is persistent and not (almost) always fleeting - going by the age of other stars and their exoplanets in the galaxy, we would expect there to be signs of life visible in abundance (e.g. electromagnetic waves of clearly artificial origin as “background chatter”).
The fact that this isn’t so, indicates that something about that assumption has to be wrong. What exactly, we cannot easily say, and theories go all the way from “Life like humanity really is exceedingly rare and needs very special circumstances and ‘luck’” to “technological life quickly evolves to a point, where it doesn’t produce any signs like that” to “there is a great filter still ahead of us, which extinguishes life wherever it arises” to “life behaves according to Dark Forest rules and actively tries to stay hidden”.
But all of those are currently just wild speculation. The only thing certain is, that we have found none of the abundance of chatter we would expect from many worlds having had more time than our Earth to theoretically develop life akin to our own. And the most we so far have noticed are some sporadic signs that may hint at basic life, e.g. on K2-18b, but it is all in the “very fuzzy and uncertain” ballpark.