Soon these oligarchs won’t even own a window to jump out of

Make bigger batches and freeze portions. And whatever expense groceries are, you can expect food cooked by someone else and delivered by someone else to be 3x as much.

Some government hand out “baby kits” for newborns - cot, blanket, nappies, bottles etc.

I think they should also hand out “self sufficiency kits” to new adults - pot & pan, utensils, cutlery, self sufficiency book w recipes, salt/pepper/herbs, coffee, tea seeds, vouchers and some other bits & pieces. Basically something to foster some independence, interest in cooking, diet and other life skills in new adults. And the school curriculum should also foster life skills.

Doesn’t stop people eating out or buying takeaways but it shouldn’t be the norm.

I don’t get why people would waste money on delivery services. Would it kill someone to cook their own food, or collect food from a takeaway themselves? That’s especially true for fast food where the fees & delivery charges could cost almost as much as the food itself.

Germany collects glass, plastic & aluminium. Glass and plastic can be single use or multiuse. It’s kind of interesting how most beer is sold multi-use (every brand is using the same size bottles) to reduce the amount of recycling necessary. Beer bottles can be washed and reused rather than broken into cullet and remelted. I don’t know what France does but I could see people losing their minds if wine bottles were standardised the way beer is. But really glass could be collected and recycled even if it isn’t reusable.

The cap and the bottle in soft drinks are made of PET. Most deposit schemes will accept plastic (PET), or aluminium and a machine will separate and sort the material into the appropriate bin. Cans get melted down, plastic is stripped, washed, turned into pellets and fed back into hoppers that make new bottles. Because it’s all the same plastic material it can be ground up into pellets and fed back into a machine to make new bottles. The biggest issue is probably that caps are usually black, red, blue or whatever so I imagine somewhere in the process the chopped up plastic goes past cameras that sort fragments by colour.

Annoying? Am I the only one who thinks it’s more convenient? The cap cannot fall, you can open it one handed, you cannot lose the cap…

I’m not saying its good that homeless people rely on collecting bottles. But the fact they have cash value means they will collect them and feed them back into the system. So less litter and more recycling.

In many countries people collect their own bottles because there is a refundable tax on the container. Here in Ireland it’s 15c, i.e. a can of coke might be €1 but you’ll be charged €1.15. So it motivates people to take the empties back to a supermarket and receive a refund chit. It also motivates homeless people to pick up bottles & cans that people toss, so that too.

I was interested in that whole ecoli eating plastic and producing 95% acetaminophen from it by mass. Maybe we can stop a lot of the plastic from water/soda bottles and just medicate ourselves till our livers shit themselves out our assholes.

Also it means recycle schemes get a % boost because a lot more bottles come back for recycling with their caps. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cap is 10-20% of the total plastic in a bottle so caps were missing then that’s wasted opportunity.

I remember as a kid when ring pulls on case used to detach and that’s the same thing too. I remember my dad metal detecting on the beach and he’d recover dozens of ringpulls because people just tossed them.

The root problem is that plastic can be recycled but many countries to not motivate their populations to recycle, nor their industries to use reusable containers or to purchase recycled materials and create circular economies. In countries that do have deposit return schemes, reuse & recycling rates are far higher. I see attaching the cap to the bottle as way to squeeze a little more % out of those schemes.

I don’t know what % of plastic the cap comprises in a plastic bottle but I bet its double digits. So annoying as it is to use, attaching the cap to the bottle does make sense for recycling. It also lessens litter.

But it needs to be paired up with a deposit refund scheme. Lots of countries do this already and encourages circular economies - the soft drinks companies purchasing recycle material to reuse. I bet those schemes measured a significant jump in recovered plastic when virtually all the caps come back with the bottles.

I remember watching some fox channels with a lot of rescue foxes including one called Finnegan. Was that her? So sad that anyone would harass somebody like that.

No love for Patchface in GoT? Creepiest jester ever.

Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

A good question to ask, is what would happen if Lemmy was the victim of astroturfing. It’s decentralized for starters and groups might not even reside in the same place on the fediverse. Also I expect Reddit has monitoring, analytics and tools that could flag behaviour rather than somebody having to go through logs trying to find patterns.

I think Lemmy and other federated platforms have escaped having to deal with these issues simply because someone attempting to astroturf will do it on the biggest platform. So Lemmy escapes not by any technical or administrative virtue but by being smallfry.

An LLM is an ordered series of parameterized / weighted nodes which are fed a bunch of tokens, and millions of calculations later result generates the next token to append and repeat the process. It’s like turning a handle on some complex Babbage-esque machine. LLMs use a tiny bit of randomness (“temperature”) when choosing the next token so the responses are not identical each time.

But it is not thinking. Not even remotely so. It’s a simulacrum. If you want to see this, run ollama with the temperature set to 0 e.g.

ollama run gemma3:4b
>>> /set parameter temperature 0
>>> what is a leaf

You will get the same answer every single time.

I think if I were any non-US government I’d be very seriously thinking about not using Microsoft software at this time, particularly if it connects to the cloud. And that goes for companies with government contracts, or merely companies who are potential targets of industrial espionage.

That said, LibreOffice needs to tap the EU for funding to broaden its features and also improve the UX because it’s not great tbh. It can be extremely frustrating using LibreOffice after using MS Office, in part because the UI is so different, noisy with esoteric actions, and very unrefined compared to its MS counterpart. That needs funding and to get to the point that somebody can pick up LibreOffice for the first time and not be surprised or stuck by the way it behaves.

It’s even worse when AI soaks up some project whose APIs are constantly changing. Try using AI to code against jetty for example and you’ll be weeping.

All AIs are the same. They’re just scraping content from GitHub, stackoverflow etc with a bunch of guardrails slapped on to spew out sentences that conform to their training data but there is no intelligence. They’re super handy for basic code snippets but anyone using them anything remotely complex or nuanced will regret it.

Hardly surprising. Llms aren’t -thinking- they’re just shitting out the next token for any given input of tokens.

It’s was her certainty in a fucked up belief set that makes her like RFK jr.

She allowed the sick to suffer and die because it was god’s will they should. She fed and housed the sick for her own salvation but made them suffer for theirs. What did not occur to her, is to actually treat those in her care, or separate the ones with communicable diseases, or offer palliative care or other relief. People died in squalid conditions while Mother Theresa was being feted by dictators and raking in millions.

So that’s why I compared RFK jr to her. They have certainty to their beliefs and they will not allow the evidence of their own eyes or those around shake that belief from them. And it is other people who suffer and die because of it.