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Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2024年2月1日

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  • The Taco Bell meme afaik isn’t about food poisoning at all, it’s that it’s a lot of oil-rich beans, which can have a certain effect.

    Regarding food poisoning, I think you’re right that it’s worse in the USA, but the EU is not without food poisoning. My suspicion is that the media attention is different in part because food in Europe tends to come from smaller farms, whereas in the USA it tends to come from larger farms (is my understanding). So, an outbreak at a farm in the USA is bad because it potentially affects a huge number of people, whereas in the EU it may be a smaller farm with less of an impact (so any individual outbreak is less impactful). Just a guess, and it’s in my opinion good to strive for lots of small farms rather than a few big ones.




  • This is obvious though — currently, you might test a drug on mice, then on primates, and finally on humans (as an example). It would be faster to skip the early bits and go straight to human testing.

    …but that is very, very, very wrong. Science of course doesn’t care about right and wrong, nor does it care if you “believe” in it, which is the beautiful thing about science — so a scientifically sound experiment is a scientifically sound experiment regardless of ethical considerations. (Which does not mean we should be doing it of course!)

    Now, taking a step back, maybe you’re right that, in the long run, throwing ethics out the window would actually slow things down, as it would (rightfully) cause backlash. But that’s getting into a whole “sociology of science” discussion.




  • Jobs created toxic work environments.

    …and so did Linus Torvalds* — he’s certainly not the embodiment of capitalism. But I absolutely have a huge amount of respect for Torvalds, even if I don’t approve of his way of interpersonal/professional style.

    (I used to run Arch btw [but I run Debian now].)

    *He’s supposedly taken steps in the right direction here and has made improvements.



  • On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

    That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.

    Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.









  • Lemmy is not encrypted, my comments are public, your comments are public, we both know that. Anyone with a raspberry pi or an old netbook can scrape them.

    If I use an encrypted service and all of a sudden everything that I thought was encrypted was decrypted by the service provider without my consent? That’s breaking encryption.

    If on the other hand I use an encrypted service and they tell me that they can no longer offer the service, my data will be destroyed after X days, and I need to find another way of storing my encrypted data because of privacy invading government policies? That is not breaking encryption.


  • For many things I completely agree.

    That said, we just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family — for free, essentially! — is astonishing. And it’s not a big deal, not something we plan, just, “hey let’s say hi to Gramma and Gramps!”

    When I was a kid, videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance phone call, we’d sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this was on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend “across the pond” whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.

    I think technology that “feels like tech” is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There’s some pretty amazing stuff there.