• 0 Posts
  • 114 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 1st, 2024

help-circle


  • Not_mikey@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzCoconuts 🥥
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    10 days ago

    1 and 2 I think have pretty good consensus. The Bering land bridge opened about 10,000 years ago while the Polynesians didn’t reach Hawaii until 900 ad, so if they got to South America it was probably after that. There is some speculation that some separate group of people crossed over even before them since evidence shows that the south American coast became populated very quickly after the Bering bridge opened. Like they got to South America before they got to the interior of north America. That could be because the Rockies are large and without the fish that those people were probably eating, or it could be that some very early people, millennium before the Polynesians domesticated coconuts, made the crossing. That theory of very far in the realm of speculation but it’s a fun theory.


  • Not_mikey@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzCoconuts 🥥
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    71
    ·
    edit-2
    11 days ago

    According to wikipedia this is the less likely and imo less interesting explanation. They did find coconuts that are genetically distinct from the ones the Spanish brought over from the Philippines, but those ones are more distantly related to the ones in polynesia so they probably didn’t float over. Instead they are more likely evidence of pre-columbian contact of Polynesians with south and central America, along with sweet potatoes originating in South America but being present in polynesia and SEA prior to columbus.

    So this would boot Columbus off the podium in people who discovered America.

    1. Bering strait people / native American ancestors

    2. Polynesian people

    3. Vikings, Leif Erickson

    4. Columbus


  • Depends who owns it / who payed to have it constructed. If the tenets own it and payed to have it constructed, or payed someone who payed someone… Then it’s a condo or a co-op depending on whether you own a unit in the building or own x% of the building which entitles you to a unit.

    If another organization, almost always some form of government, payed to have it constructed and owns it then it is public housing.

    If it’s anything like cities skylines original, houses just pop up according to demand with seemingly no construction cost calculated, probably because it would add a ton more complexity with mortgages and speculative markets etc. for little gain to players who mostly just want to play with trains and metros.



  • What’s your issue with big tech?

    I know a lot of libertarians oppose corporatism because they say the corporations market power and monopolies derive from government, but for big tech they mostly come from economies of scale and network effects, neither of which I think right wing libertarians oppose.

    If you oppose it because corporate power, even if gained through fair free market principles, is a barrier to liberty than I think your on the left for a libertarian. The recognition that corporate power can be just as tyrannical and coercive as state power is not an idea held by most libertarians in the u.s. who tend to focus solely on state power. Recognizing both puts you to the left of most of them, and on the far left you have Chomsky who identifies as a socialist libertarian and thinks corporate/capitalist power is so much more of a threat than state power that we should give the state more power to be able to reign in corporations.



  • Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday. “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”

    Didn’t COMMUNIST China ban it mostly because it was putting strain on their grid? Not sure how wasting states worth of electricity to fuel a glorified ponzi scheme is going to help with energy dominance but who am I to question the self-proclaimed genius.


  • Hosting/streaming videos is not free.

    Neither is creating content. Argue all you want on how Google is evil and doesn’t deserve the money, 50% of the revenue is still going to creators and ad-blockers do cut into there paychecks.

    Also doesn’t make sense longing for the days of ad-free YouTube. Besides the fact it was unsustainable and would’ve gone the way of vine after a few years, it was just worse. It was full of 2 minute compilations of guys getting hit in the balls at 240p, not the 1080p 10 minute video essays with research that people have become accustomed to. That kind of quality costs money.





  • This would be true if chomskys claim was that he was simply studying human language acquisition and that machines are different, but his claim was that machines can’t learn human languages because they don’t have some intuitive innate grammar.

    Saying an llm hasn’t learned language becomes harder and harder the more you talk to it and the more it starts walking like a duck and quacking like a duck. To make that claim you’ll need some evidence to counter the demonstrable understanding the llm displays. Chomsky in his nytimes response just gives his own unprovable theories on innate grammar and some examples of questions llms “can’t answer” but if you actually ask any modern llm they answer them fine.

    You can define “learning” and “understanding” in a way that excludes llms but you’ll end up relying upon unprovable abstract theories until you can come up with an example of a question/prompt that any human would answer correctly and llms won’t to demonstrate that difference. I have yet to see any such examples. There’s plenty of evidence of them hallucinating when they reach the edge of their understanding, but that is something humans do as well.

    Chomsky is still a very important figure and his work on politics with manufacturing consent is just as relevant as when it was written over 20 years ago. His work on language though is on shaky grounds and llms have made it even shakier.


  • Inflation is not purely a boon to the capitalists and rich. If you’re a working class person with a student loan, or mortgage or any type of long term debt you benefit from inflation as the value of that debt goes down over time. Meanwhile if your the bank holding that debt then inflation hurts you as the bond backed by that debt will go down in value over time. So assets that are backed by loans (bonds) go down in value while assets backed by equity( % ownership in a company/stocks, real estate etc) are uneffected like you said. This is why a lot of capitalists favor static or even deflationary currency as the value of their bonds will go up while not effecting their stocks. Deflation for the poor though can result in debt traps, where the value of the debt you owe goes up over time and makes it impossible to get out of, which is great for banks, the longer your paying minimum payments and interest without touching the principle the better. This is why populists in the western u.s. demanded inflation in the late nineteenth century because they were drowning in unpayable mortgages, and the rich eastern bankers refused since they were raking in all the money from those mortgages.

    Also you’re putting the cart before the horse, inflation is caused by a lot of things, but one of the main causes, and the main cause in this last round, is rising wages, not some government conspiracy. If we’re looking at the economy from a Marxist view that when an item is sold a certain amount of it goes to fixed costs, a certain amount goes to labor and a certain amount goes to capital. If say a toothbrush costs $5 , and $3 goes to fixed costs, $1 goes to the laborer who made it and $1 goes to the capitalist who owns it. Now say that laborer uses there new labor power obtained from unionizing or surviving a pandemic that put a lot of people out of the labor pool they can demand an increase in their wage, say to $2. This extra dollar can’t come out of the fixed costs, ideally it would come out of the capitalist share, but since the capitalist controls the price they will just raise that, and maybe add bit extra. So the laborer has to deal with increased prices, so they demand more wages which creates a feedback loop leading to ever increasing inflation.

    In this sense inflation is the natural result of class conflict in a capitalist system where capital controls the prices. The government in this case is usually tasked with reigning in inflation rather than creating it. Early on in the Nixon years this was done through price controls and wage controls, neither capital or labor could increase there price. Nowadays it’s done through interest rates to cause or at least make people think there’s a recession so that labor will stop asking for higher wages.



  • That’s a very solvable problem though, AI can easily be run off green energy and a lot of the new data centers being built are utilizing it, tons are popping up in Seattle with its abundance of hydro energy. Compare that to meat production or transportation via combustion which have a much harder transition and this seems way less of an existential problem then the author makes it out to be.

    Also most of the energy needed is for the training which can be done at any time, so it can be run on off peak hours. It can also absorb surpluses from solar energy in the middle of the day which can put strain on the grid.

    This is all assuming it’s done right, which it may not and could exasperate the ditch were already in, but the technology itself isn’t inherently bad.


  • By most accounts meth is less addictive then tobacco or alcohol . We don’t think of it that way because people usually know a lot of people who drink responsibly but we often only see problematic meth users mostly because it’s usually people with problems that use meth. If normal healthy people had access to meth they would probably fall into similar use patterns that they have with alcohol, some people using it only on occasions, some more frequently and some that become full on addicts. That’s horrible for the people that do become addicts but if they have the genetic and emotional disposition for addiction they’d probably become addicted to something any way, whether that be illegal meth, or some other legal or illegal substance. Prohibition does not stop addiction because addicts will find some way to get there high.

    This isn’t to say that it should be sold by just anyone and go by the rules of capitalism, as capitalism and addictive substances do not mix well. It should only be sold in non-profit or government run stores to remove profit motive, and there should be non-discript packaging with no advertising allowed FOR ALL ADDICTIVE SUBSTANCES not just meth. The main problem with a lot of these drugs is capitalism looking for endless growth at the cost of human lives.


  • Thanks for the pointers! Like the meme though I keep it plugged into a mouse, keyboard etc. so don’t really use it but when I do it’s good except that one issue.

    At worst, perhaps you can put Linux onto your existing Mac hardware and therefore configure it more directly?

    I wish, it’s my work computer though and even though all the software I need and the software I’m developing runs on Linux, I think IT would get mad If I loaded Linux on it. Also why I probably can’t do any of the other changes you suggested