Yeah you can run it yourself, of there are some public instances that seem to work well enough. I imagine it’s going to be a long term cat-and-mouse game between reddit and the reddit front ends. Reddit will figure out a way to break them, then the devs will find a workaround. Rince and repeat.

If anyone knows of a similar tool to access Facebook marketplace, I would be very interested.

Their name has now been changed to Stellar Mass Games.

I haven’t participated in reddit in quite awhile. But I still lurk on some niche communities, and often the site is the best result from search results. For those like me, I recommend redlib. It’s a reddit front-end that lets you browse reddit without the abusive behavior. It won’t allow you to post or comment, but you can still browse.

Reddit lost access to my comment contributions when their AI banned me for stupid reasons. They lost what ad revenue they could get from me when they blocked old reddit.

The harder you squeeze, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Yeah from the site it seems they’re using a seasonal model.

There’s a question to give a judge an aneurysm. How do age of consent laws work when time machines are involved?

Bioluminescent plants exist as a commercial product. You can order them right now. I ordered some of these myself. (Though I’m terrible with plants. I didn’t water them enough, and they died.)

But this isn’t vaporware. You can actually order them, and I have. What is vaporware however is the idea of using these as streetlights. With the petunias I had, if you took them into a dark room and let your eyes adjust, you could see a faint blue glow off of some regions of the petunia’s petals.

But these are true bioluminescent plants. It took adding multiple genetic alterations to get the petunias to carry their bioluminescence from generation to generation, but this has been done.

Hold your horses there buddy. You’re forgetting the sub-micron filtration! And do you even own an autoclave? 😂

Honestly, I think this is overblown at this point. We’re seeing now that giant ad budgets, while helpful, are not some silver bullet. El-Sayed was massively outspent by Stevens.

What people miss is that there is a certain saturation point for ad dollars. The parties love to spend as much money as possible, as the consultant class takes a cut of everything. But we’re seeing now that mass TV ad spend just isn’t what it used to be. You can persuade some people that way, but once everyone knows your name and general message, each dollar you spend is less and less effective.

The point is that in these big races, we can probably get 90% of the effect with 20% of the budget. This allows candidates to fund their campaigns mostly with small-dollar donations. You only need to take oligarch money if you want to have the massive ad spend.

And taking oligarch money has electoral consequences. We can’t run populist left candidates. We have to run extremely unpopular centrist corporate candidates. They have to carefully choose all their policies to not offend their wealthy donors. The only hope this type of candidate has is through massive ad spending. But if we simply run more popular candidates, the need for ads is low enough that campaigns can be funded by small dollar donors and mass boots-on-the-ground voter outreach. Unpopular candidates also have trouble getting people passionate enough to volunteer their time for the ground game.

Denmark wouldn’t send police. They would send troops. We’re talking specifically about the idea that you can just send regular police to arrest a hostile foreign mining operation.

We’re not talking about some miners with a handful of handguns. I would assume such a hostile mining operation would be guarded by heavily armed private military contractors, someone like Blackwater. Think machine guns mounted on Humvees. Maybe the militarized American police could handle it. But I imagine the Greenland cops would have some issues.

It’s amusing you think laws and police have any relevance when talking about armed conflict. Do you also wonder why Ukraine didn’t just send the police to arrest the incoming Russian invaders? After all, every Russian soldier on Ukrainian soil is violating numerous Ukrainian immigration, weapons, and trespassing laws. Why bother with the military? Just send the police to arrest them!

You’re assuming the illegal drillers/miners aren’t guarded by heavily armed military contractors.

If you’re worried about corruption affecting 401ks, you should look at the corruption inside state pension funds.

The party is lead by people who would be Republicans if they happened to live in a red state. They don’t actually believe in anything. They just seek power. People like this become Republicans in red states and Democrats in blue states. Centrist wafflers in purple states.

There is no need for it. Sorry. Certainly not government mandated, which is the worst part.

YOU have no need of it. You’re projecting your experiences onto everyone else. Maybe you’re content only hanging out in limited forums where you have to know someone to join. And those forums can continue to operate without any human verification. If you don’t care whether the spaces you occupy are infested with bots, or can manage with white lists, fine. But most people don’t want to talk to bots. Not everyone has the social connections you do.

I don’t support mandating ID for anything. But you are not the only person in the world. Just because you have no need of it, doesn’t mean no one does. Not everyone uses the internet the same way you do.

“Only join forums where you personally know the people there” is not a scalable solution to this problem.

Respect a diversity of viewpoints and experiences. Your way is not the only way.

That will always be the case for online age verification. There’s nothing preventing an adult from signing up for an account and then just giving the account to a kid. This is true no matter the verification method chosen. Unless you’re going to demand people scan their face every time they log in, and even then there are ways around it.

My goal is not to create a perfect solution. My goal is to create a good-enough solution that is as reliable as face or ID scanning, but without the privacy violations.

There is a clear need for it. There’s value in having online discussion spaces that aren’t just swamped with bots. We really need a reliable way of telling human from bot. I want to find a way to do that preserves privacy to the greatest degree possible.

Do you have any constructive criticism to offer? Maybe a suggested improvement, or an alternative way to accomplish the same goal? What’s your solution to separate human from bot?

Agriculture also seems unlikely unless youre a sentient carp or something

We already have sentient carp. Or at least, sentient denizens of the deep.

We already have that here.

Sperm whales communicate with each other in a language as complex and information-dense as our own. It is reasonable to assume they are sentient. We are not discussing the hypothetical sentience of matrix math on silicon chips here. We’re talking about another biological entity, with a brain of the same fundamental nature as our own, with a brain much larger than our own, of common evolutionary heritage to our own. And by what other objective measure could we use to measure the sentience of another biological mind, than the complexity of its communication? You could look at behavior. But they’re complex social mammals just like we are.

If we are sentient, so are they. I’m sure they have thoughts and as complex of inner lives as we do.

I wonder what their culture is like. Do they tell stories of great hero whales of the ancient past to their children?

Or are they more learned? Are they down there debating the finer points of philosophy like Plato and Aristotle? They couldn’t do anything experimental. Perhaps they would become masters of classical philosophy.

Perhaps, more ominously, if we can learn to talk to them…what will they want to tell us? I wonder if they still have a cultural memory of the whaling days. Are there sperm whales alive today who hear tales from their elders about the time humans ruthlessly hunted their kind? Do they doubt they are real, wondering if they’re merely old superstitions? These seem so different from the humans you know. (Mostly.)

Or would their culture be so different, that none of these concepts would even remotely map to the things cultural touch stones I cite?

https://nordpil.com/static/images/ocean_productivity_full.png

A picture’s worth a thousand words. By far the most productive regions of the ocean are the shallow waters of the continental shelves. Maybe you could have an ocean world that was entirely shallow seas. But when I imagine an ocean world, I imagine abyssal depths spanning an entire planetary surface. Such a world would have far less ocean abundance than our own.

It wouldn’t be a complete desert. Plenty of life does exist far from the continental shelves. It’s just that these are the most productive regions of the ocean.

The problem with life is you need more than just water. Living things are mostly water, but the water is the boring part. And a lot of the essential building blocks of life tend to fall out of the water column as marine snow.

In shallow water, the depths that light can penetrate can also interact with the ocean floor. This allows more churning of vital materials. Plus there is a constant flow of new minerals and nutrients flowing in from the land.

In a deep ocean world? There would be very few minerals and nutrients available at any depth light could reach. Some would still work its way up through the action of currents, but nothing like the shallow waters.

And then you have to consider the nightmares Nature spawns, with terrors beyond any found in our oceans. A neat thing happens with oceans if you make them too deep. Pile enough water on top of water, and exotic high-temperature ices form under all that pressure. Some Super-Earths host oceans of scales beyond comprehension, but they are vast deserts made of water. If you kept piling water on Earth’s surface, once the water got about 600 miles deep the exotic ices would start to form. This depth will vary based on the size of the planet, but for any given size, passed a certain point, the ocean has ice at the bottom.

And that is a problem for life. The water column is now cut off from the planet’s crust. Volcanoes might periodically spew out some material through the ice shell, but we’re already talking low-productivity worlds to begin with.

Now a shallow ocean world, a planetary continental shelf? THAT would be something to behold. But such worlds should be rare. Your ocean depth has to be tuned just right. On the scale from “mile’s deep ocean” to “planetary desert,” a planetary 100-foot deep ocean is just to the left of being a planetary desert.

Are there commercial virus-printing services? If so, what keeps some yahoo from sending them the virus-equivalent of a .stl file for smallpox? Can someone just order virulent pathogens printed on command?