Mastodon is a fairly finicky beast, has a few dependencies that you also have to manage (redis, sidekiq, Postgres), and is surprisingly resource intensive.
So you can do it, but it’s not really designed for that use case.
I would be great if there were a full-featured single user ActivityPub server, but last time I looked, there wasn’t really.
Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.
> Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place.
That is just a mathematical truism. If all species died tomorrow and only humans were left we'd still hit an equilibrium where species were going extinct at the same rate new ones were appearing. The system moves quickly to an equilibrium where usually extinctions = new species.
In practice ecosystems collapse fairly regularly. This stuff isn't planned and nature is messy. Every time something changes ecosystems might collapse.
> Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Sure. Most people would make a show of moral objection to that. But if we look at what the humans actually do - they typically kill everything in sight that is larger than dog, concrete over what is left and poison any insects that made it through the slaughter. I dunno if anyone is tracking how many species we've wiped out on the road to apex predator, but there are going to be quite a few already. Cities are great for humans and not much else. In fact, we purposefully cause ecosystem collapses because it suits us.
That argument is only going to get pushback from very argumentative people but it is actually unpersuasive in practice. A billion human deaths is a tragedy but extinct species seems like it would be acceptable for bettering the material comfort of humans. Humans have generally accepted that trade in the past and we're still purposefully trying to ... I dunno, specie-cide a few that we don't like.
No it isn’t. Diversity rates have risen and fallen over the history of life, and it can take many millions of years for life to re-diversify after a mass extinction event (like the one we are causing now). Evolution by natural selection is not rapid when it comes to larger organisms.
During that time the number of new species will be approximately equal to the number dying out though. Otherwise the re-population would be rapid. The reason it takes millions of years in that case is because the two rates generally pretty similar. It is quite hard to get the two rates to stay far apart for any length of time. It is a truism that they match and they're going to return to matching whatever humans do. And them matching doesn't mean that the number of species isn't drifting radically over time.
I get that thejohnconway probably didn't literally mean it when he said "Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place" in the sense of it always being true no matter how many species there are - but one of the major issues with the global warming debate is it is actually pretty hard to articulate what the problem is with a lot of species going extinct if people don't use vague language like that which sounds bad but doesn't actually have much of a point to it. People will generally not notice. Nobody notices all the things that have already gone extinct. The world will just be what they are used to for most people. Most species are threats, nuisances or domesticated and as safe as humans are.
Species is a concept that isn't particularly well defined, and certainly not in palaeontology. One can see, however, diverging body plans (disparity), distinct lineages (diversity). If we take our extinction further, it will probably be tens of millions of years before we see the kind of diversity and disparity we had until the last couple of centuries. Its the period of imbalance that causes the problem.
Anyway, congrats on not caring about nature. It's must feel very free.
The average person lives in a city where they don't interact with nature, aren't near nature and aren't particularly affected by nature. People aren't argumentative about it but their choices suggest that on balance, the normal response is not to care. There are more important things to worry about like the well-being of humans.
If all species besides humans went extinct tomorrow, humans would also quickly go extinct. The equilibrium would be 0 extinctions and 0 new species.
Maybe millions or billions of years years later that would increase to >0, but i think its fair to call that a total collapse of all life on Earth for those interim years.
You think Nvidia's advantage on LLM is hardware? It's the software ecosystem around the GPU (that Nvidia took a decade+ to build) that is the advantage.
They run hot, and don’t stick to the phone as well as I’d like. No, MagSafe batteries aren’t the solution for me, and I too would buy a thicker phone with more battery life.
In fact, it turned out that Darth Vader was Lukes father.
Contextual fictional facts are really common in language. I remember doing it in philosophy first year. It conundrum-y philosophically, but usually understood effortlessly in normal discourse.
People are responding to you saying that it doesn't retain the yin-yang shape, but I've been watching for a while on 64x speed, and the yin-yang shape is one it repeatedly returns to.
I'm not even a dimwitted individual with an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology, but I can see what's happening intuitively. When one of the balls makes an indent large enough, that indent focusses the bounce from the circular edge which reinforces the indent further. This leads to a semi-stable shape where one of the balls is bouncing around a horseshoe and the other in a tunnel. However, if one side of the horseshoe becomes pinched small enough that ball is less likely to enter, that side of get eliminated, and you have a yin-yang.
More simply, the round edge seems to encourage tunnelling, and any asymmetry in the tunnelling is yin-yang-ish.
I don't think that's a good way of stating it. You get the posts from the people anyone on your server follows. An admin can block or silence accounts, or run a relay, but these are edge cases.
you can say "hey could you refollow those instances"
you could throw more money into the instance's tip jar to make it easier for them to decide to rehost a larger part of the data firehose - that may not be the entire reason they defederated from an instance but it may be part of it
you could move to another instance whose admin's choices are more in line with yours
True, so it's not an improvement. I guess it is even worse because when they unfollow an instance they may ban hundreds of users just because there are a few problematic ones.
Interestingly, in the Apple App Store, there is no option to filter by "paid". Only free. I want an option to filter by "paid, no IAP". Actually, I don't mind IAp for things like new levels and such. It's just so badly abused by mobile games.
Apple made one concession to consumer protection law and the FTC by changing the "free" button to "get", but I'm sure they know how those slot machines work, and where the money comes from.
At one point in-app purchases were listed clearly and prominently so they were easy to inspect (and hopefully embarrassing for nonsense like $99 wheelbarrows of smurfberries[1].) Now it seems like IAP rates are hidden below the fold, unfortunately.
I'm not saying the Apple store isn't responsible for the problems of free to play. They really are. Apple has a memory of when their hardware was beholden to software like Adobe or Microsoft and they designed the store to avoid that problem. It really favors cheap apps, and they used to really discourage offering a sample and then unlocking the full app for a purchase. This was supposed to be so you didn't have "bait and switch" but really it just trained people to think no app was worth paying for. Even though they did pay so much for loot boxes..
So now there's an alternative way to pay. Let's be happy about that.
Every so often Apple will themselves feature a selection of popular pay-once-and-get-it-all games in the store as an ad capsule.
... actually, I just checked, and if you scroll down enough in the Games tab on your iPhone's App Store app, they seem to be running it now under "Pay Once & Play". Might be worth a look.
