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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It’s true in a capitalist system for sure. Automation causes fewer people to be responsible for more profit, so fewer people see the benefit of it. Capitalists argue it will just cause prices to fall, but a) to what, if many people can’t find a stable job, and b) prices are quick to rise but slow to fall, nobody wants to take a loss on what they paid for/forecast, and businesses implementing this tech certainly aren’t expecting to have to lower prices. Less money getting you more value increases the value of money - also known as deflation, and something economists avoid as it’s quite painful.

    Automation itself can be good for humans though. I don’t think people should be stuck doing a bullshit job nobody really needs just because we don’t want to eliminate a job. Our goal as human society should be for people to have more and more choice over how they spend their own time. Even if we eliminate basically all necessary work from human existence, creative works have intrinsic value to the people who create them at the very least, and often value to many other people as well - AI will never eliminate that even if AI becomes very creative itself.

    Mandatory work should be something we try to eliminate, and replaced by people generally being able to choose to do whatever they want within reason. This is not something that makes any sense in a capitalist system, so rather than attacking automation and keeping capitalism just because that creates a more equal income distribution, we should be working toward replacing capitalism with something better, and automation is a part of getting there.







  • How many people did the Fukushima incident actually kill? Meanwhile people are actively being killed by air pollution and climate change caused by fossil fuel energy. Nuclear energy incidents seem worse because they happen over a short period of time, but it’s just like with airplanes - plane crashes are horrific and disastrous, but statistically airplanes are massively safer than even rail and especially road transport.

    It requires good governance and adherence to safety standards and upkeep to be safe, but we’ve shown that we can reasonably do that for the most part.

    Renewables should of course be the first priority, though lithium mining is also a significant health hazard - but really when you compare everything statistically and not just by the significance of individual events, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be trying to eliminate fossil fuels by any feasible means, and that includes nuclear power.





  • Linux, if we’re counting the entire userland and typical components rather than just the kernel and its interface, definitely has worse (binary) compatibility than Windows, and potentially even Mac OS. The only saving grace is things like Flatpak which bundle the entire system tree they need with them and therefore have pretty long-lasting binary compatibility. But it’s quite normal to have to recompile some old software from scratch when some common system libraries get updated, really only core things like glibc have long-lasting binary compatibility, and you can’t even guarantee that compatible system libraries still exist even when compiling from source sometimes, because every project has a different approach to backward compatibility.

    Now, to be honest, things are much better with containerization (like flatpak/snap/docker/etc.), but that doesn’t really help you much for software that’s older than those unless someone bothers to try to figure out all of the dependencies and package them up and it still works. The only reason why it seems to be okay is that Linux distributions recompile all of the deps for you every time something changes and you get everything all at once, so you rarely see any of that all break. But if you have anything compiled from source, and you didn’t statically link the whole thing, you’ll see the problem.