Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.

I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’

People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you

The problem is that’s kinda true of pretty much everywhere so your choices are to isolate and only get lied to by your own politicians and corporate overlords or to accept the complexity of the world and try to work on moving forward where possible.

I do agree that this entirely greed based approach from the company is wrong but honestly I prefer it to your extreme xenophobia towards them. Yes there are issues with China just like all our countries have issues, they’re not the devil though not by a long shot.

Do you get the super creepy ‘easten European girls are popular because of their traditional values…’ and the I’ve that’s ‘Chinese women want to come and study in but need loving middle aged men to have sex with them while they’re here…’ I’m paraphraseing of course but that’s basically what they say.

Makes me laugh when everything is sanitized because advertiser’s don’t want to appear next to anything untoward then the adverts are for human traffickers.

Though honestly the ‘student was expelled for inventing a more efficient heater’ advert is possibly worse, of course he was expelled he broke the laws of physics, he should have been arrested! Why is such an obvious scam allowed but a friendly Australian can’t call his cobba a cunt?

Free cad is brilliant especially if you come from a more technical understanding rather than an artistic one.

That’s ridiculous, if I think that one apple plus one apple is going to result in three apples then I try it and find it’s actually two I’m not going to blame the universe I’m going to know my understanding of arithmetic is flawed.

It’s not the math of the human made model that controls the universe that would be silly. The model is the current best approximation of the actual math that defines the universe.

An accurate model allows you to predict the outcome of events, like we can predict how many apples will be in the bag. With some things it gets very complicated because there’s lots of things and various possible states but we can model that with statistics and calculous and stuff. We can even make a set of all possibile results and use that as a map to tell us if something is possible, how likely it is and what we can do to make it more or less likely - nothing the guy said was controversial, we can map cellar interactions even if that requires using complex multidimensional math (mathematics have had to get used to doing this sort of math a lot recently so I’m sure they’ll manage)

You’re using odd ways of describing things to try and win a pointless argument, even if everything you say is correct then it changes literally nothing about anything so whatever yeah use words like a weirdo if you like

Yes that’s a model, I’m not saying the model magically controls reality but that the underpinning reality is math - the reason you always have two apples in a bag when you start with one and add another is because of math, the human model of that isn’t controlling it but if we want two apples in a bag and we currently only have one then we can use our model to determine how many apples we need to add into the bag.

The same is true of more complex systems, if we can accurately model the cellar interactions then we can derive solutions in the same way

Everything is math, it’s what controls gravity and cell division and protein folding - there is no god it’s all just math

Of course the model is only a model but the point is you can use the model to predict real world responses, therefore you can test millions of things and do the one which is most likely to work

But it doesn’t do that instantly and it does it for good reason, eyes and the sections of the brain using them require energy and are vulnerable to infection so in situations where they don’t provide an advantage they increase the likelihood of death before breeding thus giving any offspring born with less energy devoted to eyes has a small advantage which over s very long time results in them being selected away.

So unless the creatures reach a perfect form for their environment then they’ll always be in the process of changing and have some of the old junk in there. Also if the formerly useful part doesn’t make any real difference to survivability there’s no force driving it to be selected away from, it might eventually be removed by lots of pure chance events but that’s going to take a huge amount of generations meaning the middle time where there’s junk not yet removed us going to be very long

It’s still a rusty machine even if the maths that control it are a bit more complex

I still feel like he’s nitpicking tbh, wiring diagrams can have devices with variable or probabilistic states and though the maths is very complex it’s theoretically possible to similate and map.

The rest of the money goes into fighting for software freedom, developing infrastructure tools and other things they’re very open about.

Personally I don’t donate because I prefer to help small open source efforts where a little money makes a big difference, especially protects which I believe could help emerging open source communities grow or inspire more cc content. I’m glad Mozilla exist and that they get so much money from Google and donations

AliExpress bots have probably already read this comment and put together a ‘panic inducer top quality rechargeable usb frequency tweeter for wedding, birthday, sonic warfare, corporate and special event’ which you can buy for five dollars

Mozilla do spend a lot of money on software development, 220 million last year, out of total expenses of 425 million which came from a taking of 593 million of which 81% comes from Google.

Which is good because offering a job to someone then lowering the price you pay them after they’ve done it is evil regardless of it you’ve decided that you don’t like the company the person doing the task is working for

For the pi there’s always the option of getting a Bluetooth remote and writing your own script to send the commands when they’re triggered - it’s easier than you think because chatgpt can do all the awkward stuff for you

Yeah, I think they come from the front page, I don’t think you see it as much on more obscure articles.

Yeah Reddit always had that problem, I think it’s here too - top rated comment is someone saying it won’t work and the article is wrong, everyone just accepts it without question.

I still see people using battery breakthrough stories as an example of stuff that never comes too market despite most of them being in the very phone the person is using.

I genuinely think a lot of them are just people who hate science and engineering so don’t want people to be interested in it

I think you’re selling freedom short, yeah convenience and momentum are hard to beat but Lemmy is where the open source Devs are and the first adopters, I think we’re gonna go see a lot of interesting things emerge here which will draw a lot of users into trying it out - especially if all the other social media sites are closing their doors to people without accounts from viewing information.

What Lemmy needs is it’s own version of place, not the same thing but things that are fun and novel and community building. The basic stuff is still getting finalized but as things get established we’ll see plenty of tools made to help moderation, to enable new features and useful ways of interacting with information. Hopefully some fun games and toys too.

I’ve got a lot of work to do on my main project at the moment but I’ve also got a lot of ideas for Lemmy stuff I want to play with when I’ve got the time, I’m sure theres a lot of other people cooking up ideas and watching things develop and stabilize waiting for the right time.

No you’ve just got it compartmentalized in your head into happy little feel good boxes because you don’t want to think about the actual complexity of reality (well fictional reality)

It’s insane not because it’s a bad comparison but because it makes clear the insanity in your worldview (or galactic view I guess)