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What would remain for a future species if humans were to vanish tomorrow? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Rust needs to be reduced back to ore, using a reactive, usually coke. Coke is purified coal. Coal is a fossil fuel. You can do it with charcoal, which can be made by burning wood, so it's possible without coal, just not as efficient. This assumes you can gather the rust - it tends to break down and disperse into the environment, but if you broke up concrete to get at rusted rebar and could collect the rust, you could reduce it with charcoal.

Again, it's a matter of scale. We mine iron and deposits because we can get large amounts in seams. If you're trying to harvest rust and reduced it with charcoal, you're producing iron on the scale of making knives and swords, not cars, or combine harvesters, or more rebar.

It's a chicken-egg problem. We have been able to come as far as a have because oil, coal, and iron were just laying around on the surface, in huge quantities. Those are gone, and now you need the big tools first to get at the reserves that are left.

What would remain for a future species if humans were to vanish tomorrow? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Any worked iron product rusts. If we're talking about evolutionary time scales, any exposed metal - which is most of it - is going to be unusable within thousands of years, and even rebar embedded in concrete will be gone in millions. Heck, our concrete isn't even as good as the Romans', and even that's going to break down in thousands of years.

We've stripped the raw, surface, easily accessible stuff and worked it into things that will degrade. There may be some scavenge, but nothing that can be gathered in any quantity to build an industrial society on. At best, future societies will be like medieval Japan, where iron is rare and steel precious and hoarded, only unlike Japan, there won't be a future where they can import huge quantities of the stuff from China or Australia, because getting to the deposits now requires an industry and advanced mining equipment... which is all made out of iron they won't have.

Gold will be interesting. Again, it's not just laying around everywhere just under the surface. Instead, there will be isolated pockets of huge piles of the stuff. Gold doesn't degrade, but it's all hoarded. There's a bunch in electronics, but in tiny, tiny amounts in each device; trying to salvage that is really hard, and yields trace amounts. No more nuggets the size of your thumb, or your fist. If a future civilization could build a global economy, then gold wouldn't be an issue. Uranium will be hard, as will platinum, and platinum is a useful, but consumable, catalyst, and rare even today it'll be almost unheard of in a perpetually pre-industrial post-apocalypse.

Fossil fuels are going to be the big issue, though. What's left will simply be inaccessible, and without fossil fuels you don't have plastics, industry, fertilizers at scale, global transportation, or the ability to work whatever metal you can find, at any scale.

RustDesk, probably one of the best TeamViewer Alternatives in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

It's pretty nice, although IME it's really crashy.

At some point in history, there must have been more nuclear warheads than there were people living in Greenland in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Thank you. I don't know that I ever knew that statistic about Greenland's population. The nuke statistic tossed around - that I always heard - was something like "there are enough nukes to blow up the world a million times," with is a silly, sloppy metric that doesn't day anything about the actual warhead count. Are those Tsar Bombas, or Fat Man? How many megatons are required to "blow up the world" once? But that graph is interesting; it's even more interesting that there population of Greenland and the number of (viable) warheads on the planet have been so relatively close.

"Quell your rage" must be lesson 1 in how to internet in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I mean, if that's how you get your rocks off, you do you. Personally, I've never found vitriol to be in any way healthy.

What would remain for a future species if humans were to vanish tomorrow? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 days ago (9 children)

The biggest challenge for future intelligent species, and the reason why I know we're the first technological ones, is that we've mined all of the easily accessible metals and all of the easily accessible fossil fuels. Any intelligence arriving after us is going to have to make a civilization without iron, precious metals, oil, or coal. Unless you get into some sci-fi bio-engineering scenario where they're growing high tech, they're doomed to being stuck in the stone age. It's going to be hard for them to escape the planet, defend it from asteroids, deal with super-volcanoes, build advanced calculating devices... all of the stuff we would already find challenging even with all the resources we have.

Millions of years are not enough to replenish the fossil fuels, and the sun is going to start expanding before enough life lives and dies to produce any useful amount of biomass. Before then, more metals will become accessible, in places, but good luck working it at industrial levels without fossil fuels.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but we've given a severe handicap to advancing beyond a rudimentary agrarian society for any successor species; even if it's our own descendants re-arrising from a post-apocalyptic environmental catastrophe.

"Quell your rage" must be lesson 1 in how to internet in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (4 children)

"You're not obligated to respond", combined with "nobody else cares about your quarrel but you and that idiot" are the two maxims that make my social media experience better. Sometimes I feel like arguing, but if I think someone's arguing in bad faith, I just block 'em.

Life's too short to spend time interacting with morons.

At some point in history, there must have been more nuclear warheads than there were people living in Greenland in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (2 children)

But why would you have thought that? There have always (for recorded history values of "always") been people in Greenland; there have only relatively recently been nuclear warheads. So - regardless of truth - why would you have assumed that there must have at some point been more warheads in the world than people in Greenland? That doesn't seem like an obvious assumption, to me. What made that occur to you?

Pink Floyd - Back Catalogue in c/bodypaint
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I wish I'd have come across this in poster form! I'm not sure where I'd hang it at my stage in life, but this is Art.

New iOS call preferences (satire) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

That's a 10 hour toilet visit, right there. No mute.

Shuv e-skateboard concept is where heritage meets advanced innovation - Yanko Design in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Hey, my skateboard, now hanging on my wall, totally enhances my middle-aged-man home office, and establishes my credentials as a still-hip young-at-heart, totally not emotionally-dead middle-management-drone!

I've actually ridden it within the past year, but (a) I am absolutely certain I look ridiculous on it, and (b) I'm sincerely concerned that I'll hurt myself: old people break more easily, and heal more slowly.

Wrote a script to find decentralised communities w/in the fedi. Helps isolate the Cloudflare portion of the fedi to shift more activity to the non-tech-giant-controlled venues in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

While your mission statement says you want to increase decentralization, functionally you're maximizing subscription to communities with the smallest audiences and least amount of content. If you assume everyone in the FediVerse is browsing World, maybe that's Ok, but this approach makes topic-focused subscription browsing a wasteland.

What am I missing? Why is this good?

I will say, if support for meta-filtering was broader - browsing not by subscription, but by key phrase match in either community or post tags, this would be a good approach. It'd balance the FediVerse tree. But no client I know of supports this model, and subscribing using the approach you describe seems as if it would only make Lemmy appear dead.

121
In how many languages can you count to 10? (midwest.social)
 

Ok, Lemmy, let's play a game!

Post how many languages in which you can count to ten, including your native language. If you like, provide which languages. I'm going to make a guess; after you've replied, come back and open the spoiler. If I'm right: upvote; if I'm wrong: downvote!

My guess, and my answer...My guess is that it's more than the number of languages you speak, read, and/or write.

Do you feel cheated because I didn't pick a number? Vote how you want to, or don't vote! I'm just interested in the count.

I can count to ten in five languages, but I only speak two. I can read a third, and I once was able to converse in a fourth, but have long since lost that skill. I know only some pick-up/borrow words from the 5th, including counting to 10.

  1. My native language is English
  2. I lived in Germany for a couple of years; because I never took classes, I can't write in German, but I spoke fluently by the time I left.
  3. I studied French in college for three years; I can read French, but I've yet to meet a French person who can understand what I'm trying to say, and I have a hard time comprehending it.
  4. I taught myself Esperanto a couple of decades ago, and used to hang out in Esperanto chat rooms. I haven't kept up.
  5. I can count to ten in Japanese because I took Aikido classes for a decade or so, and my instructor counted out loud in Japanese, and the various movements are numbered.

I can almost count to ten in Spanish, because I grew up in mid-California and there was a lot of Spanish thrown around. But French interferes, and I start in Spanish and find myself switching to French in the middle, so I'm not sure I could really do it.

Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?

11
Invisibly locked posts? (midwest.social)
 

Several times now, I've tried to reply to a comment -- usually, I'm doing this on a mobile app -- and when I hit "post" I get an error. Then, when I refresh, I get a "post not found" error. Until now, I just move on, because, it's only Lemmy.

But this morning, I got the same error, and in frustration I opened the post in Firefox, and went to reply to the comment, and in the web page all of the post editing stuff was disabled. I mean, I could click "Reply" and open the reply widget, but the text editor area and all of the buttons are disabled. The post in question is this one.

Before, I speculated that the mobile app would only load so many posts back in time, and maybe they were aging out or something. Or, perhaps, some were removed by mods or the author. Although irritating, I didn't much care.

This, though, is weird, and I wonder how many of the posts I've had this issue with is because of it. It's as if the post is locked, except that there's no indication I can find that it's locked. On the web site, it at least prevents you from trying to reply -- on Voyager, it'll merrily let you spend ten minutes composing a reply only to fail to submit, but that's just a Voyager bug. However, the fact that the post is for all intents and purposes locked, but the official Lemmy UI provides no indication of this ... is this also a bug?

And is is "locked", or is this some behavior relating to cross-site blocking, where blaha.zone won't let midwest.social users post, and the server knows it and so prevents the user from trying to post? Or is it because I've blocked the poster, and Lemmy will show me, but won't let me comment on, posts by blocked users? Or is this some weird situation where the poster deleted the post but it's still showing up?

In any case, this feels like a bug. The site should clearly indicate that posts are locked, or blocked, or whatever the reason commenting is disabled. The web interface clearly knows that the post is un-comment-able; it should show this, and preferably, display why.

Or, am I missing something obvious?

70
Ea-Nasir's customer service is horrible! (lemmynsfw.com)
 

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/17187098

Hmmm

87
Self-hosted SSO (midwest.social)
 

What are you folks using for self-hosted single sign-on?

I have my little LDAP server (lldap is fan-fucking-tastic -- far easier to work with than OpenLDAP, which gave me nothing but heartburn). Some applications can be configured to work with it directly; several don't have LDAP account support. And, ultimately, it'd be nice to have SSO - having the same password everywhere if great, but having to sign in only once (per day or week, or whatever) would be even nicer.

There are several self-hosted Auth* projects; which is the simplest and easiest? I'd really just like a basic start-it-up, point it at my LDAP server, and go. Fine grained ACLs and RBAC support is nice and all, but simplicity is trump in my case. Configuring these systems is, IME, a complex process, with no small numbers of dials to turn.

A half dozen users, and probably only two groups: admin, and everyone else. I don't need fancy. OSS, of course. Is there any of these projects that fit that bill? It would seem to be a common use case for self-hosters, who don't need all the bells and whistles of enterprise-grade solutions.

109
Prague from the inside (midwest.social)
 

I had to. We should have Prague Fridays, or something.

So, the (c) on the scan is 2012, but I took the photo on BW film in late December, 1990. It's one of my favorites - probably the favorite - of my own pictures. Although, it's not the one I get the most print requests for from friends & family. It's funny how your own memories influence your artistic impressions.

762
Opening Lemmy in the morning and seeing dozens of unread comments in your inbox makes you think: what the heck did I say yesterday? (midwest.social)
83
Laser printer recommendations (midwest.social)
 

Recommendations for a color, full duplex, laser printer?

Another printer company (Brother) has fallen to the allure of "remote disable" if they object to you using your own device in a way they don't like: trying to self-service, use third party inks, whatever. It's at their discretion. Given printers are the sorts of devices to which you tend to want to have network access, preventing this is a lot of work.

I've been looking at color duplex laser printers, and Brother has been at the top of the list, until they recently announcement that they'd disable printers using third party inks.

BIFL to me implies that the company isn't going to actively sabotage self-service, or restrict your usage of the thing, so I think this is an appropriate question for this c/.

131
Educational value (midwest.social)
 

My wife's work computer desktop background changed itself today, and she called me in to see it. I said, "that's a Saw Whet." Not believing me, she looked up the credits and said, "get out! It is!"

I owe it all to !superbowl. I couldn't have identified even a Snowy before this community.

Thanks, anon6789.

57
What are Native American legends about owls? (enviroliteracy.org)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/57615714

13
correcthorse, in 27 lines of bash (midwest.social)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
7 comments fedilink
 

http://xkcd.com/936/

Not worth creating a project for, and it might be interesting to see what changes people would make.

Non-standard dependencies:

  • words, for the dictionary
  • zsh (this will probably work just fine with bash, though, too)
#!/usr/bin/zsh
# Author: @[email protected]
# 2025-02-23

final=(xargs echo)
count=6
while getopts d opt; do
	case $opt in
		d)
			final=(tr 'A-Z' 'a-z')
			;;
		*)
			printf "Password generator based on the correcthorse algorithm from http://xkcd.com/936//n/n"
			printf "USAGE: %s [-d] [#]\n" "$0"
			printf " -d  make the result all lower case; otherwise, each word will be capitalized.\n"
			printf " #   the number of words to include. Defaults to 6."
			exit 1
			;;
	esac
done
shift $(($OPTIND - 1))
[[ $# -gt 0 ]] && count=$*

shuf -n $((count * 2)) /usr/share/dict/american-english | \
	sed 's/'"'"'.*//; s/^\(\w\)/\U\1/' | \
	sort | uniq | shuf -n $count | xargs echo | \
	tr -d ' ' | $final

What's going on here:

Nearly 30% of the American dictionary (34,242) are words with apostrophes. They could be left in to help satisfy password requirements that demand "special characters," but correcthorse isn't an algorithm that handles idiot "password best practices" well anyway. So, since every word with an apostrophe has a pair word without one, we pull 2·N words to make sure we have enough. Then we strip out the plural/possessives and capitalize every word. Then we remove duplicates and select our N words from the result. Finally, we compact that into a space-less string of words, and if the user passed the -d option, we downcase the entire thing.

Without the user options, this really could be a 1-liner; that's how it started:

alias pony="shuf -n 12 /usr/share/dict/american-english | sed 's/'\"'\"'.*//; s/^\(\w\)/\U\1/' | sort | uniq | shuf -n 6 | xargs echo | tr -d ' '"
81
Tribute to an owl (midwest.social)
 

So, obviously not a real owl, but germane.

This was taken in Paris, in one of the side streets around Sacre Coeur, in 2010. It is a decoration set into a wall; the alcove was probably around 30cm high, so the owl figurine is small. I have no idea how long it'd been there, or why it was there; there was no plaque or other marking, and no other decorations on the wall.

I do recall that I took it from across the street and without telephoto, so this is massively cropped and this is the best resolution I have. The paint was more white and it was a brilliantly sunny day; I made it more warm in post-processing.

Sadly, this was before digital cameras came with GPS to stamp locations; I'm not sure if I could find this anymore.

351
hmmm (lemm.ee)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/55039423

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