No. This is a result of thinking of natural selection as working towards an “absolute” better and away from an “absolute” weaker, as opposed to pushing in directions that are entirely defined by the situation.

Natural selection is this: in populations that make copies of themselves, and have mistakes in their copies, those mistakes that better fit the situation the copies find themselves in are more likely to be represented in that population later down the line.

Note that I didn’t say, at any point, the phrase “SuRvIVaL oF ThE FiTtEsT.” Those four words have done great harm in creating a perception that there’s some absolute understanding of what’s permanently, definitely, forever better, and natural selection was pushing us towards that. But no such thing is going on: a human may have been born smarter than everyone alive and with genes allowing them to live forever, but who died as a baby when Pompeii went off - too bad they didn’t have lava protection. Evolution is only an observation that, statistically, mutations in reproduction that better fit the scenario a given population is in tend to stick around more than those that don’t - and guess what? That’s still happening, even to humans - it’s just that with medical science, we’re gaining more control of the scenario our population exists in.

Now, can we do things with medical science - or science in general - that hurts people? Sure, there’s plenty of class action lawsuits where people sued because someone claimed their medicine was good and it turned out to be bad. But if you’re asking “are we losing out on some ‘absolute better’ because we gained more control of the world we reproduce in,” no, there is no “absolute” better. There’s only “what’s helpful in the current situation,” and medicine lets us change the situation instead being forced to deal with a given situation, dying, and hoping one of our sibling mutated copies can cope.

I absolutely loved my apartment, but I pulled myself out of it because it was just far too much money and I knew that nearly all of that money was going into a hole.

Lived with a buddy for 2 years to save up a down payment, and got a house that’s nice - but honestly the renovation bit that I couldn’t do with an apartment that I really like is that I put solar panels on it. I wouldn’t have that option if I was still in my apartment.

And of course I pay people to mow the lawn, so some money still goes in a hole for sure, as it is with paying mortgage interest. But I have way more control now over how much, and whenever I plan to move I can trade a lot of that money going into the mortgage for wherever I go next, or pass it on.

A negative income tax system has the same incentive as our current bracketed tax system to earn more money: for every dollar you earn, even if a higher percentage gets taken out on that next dollar, you still have more money now.

It just shifts our brackets down so that you get “negatively taxed” - given money - for the lowest brackets of income. But a person making $100k would still be given say $15k for the first $10k of their income, $5k for next $10k, taxed at 9% for the next $10k, 20% the following $10k, so on and so forth - so that every dollar they make still means more money in their pocket, it’s just a percentage less for the additional dollars as they move brackets. Considering that’s already how it works, it seems no incentive changes would arise for high earners.

This is the “Negative Income Tax”, popularized by famously conservative Federal Reserve chair Milton Friedman as the approach to community support that best meshed with supply/demand.

The classic joke: “Do you know how journalists count? ‘One, two, trend’.”

From one of the admins:

To the people who are like “What did you expect to happen when you picked a .af domain, are you idiots?”

Yes, we were aware of the possibility of suspension from the start Yes, we were aware that political circumstances could change But thumbing your nose at conservative autocrats as an even minor form of protest is fun In the end pretty much everyone has migrated out successfully (and I’ll continue to help anyone who remains) We’ve all gotten a fun story out of this

I’ve been signalling the probable demise of queer.af to my followers for the past year. We knew the end was coming; we just anticipated it to take a little longer

So long; it was fun while it lasted.

I’d roll with calling it a cacographic puzzle, maybe?

It’s convenient. Can’t hurt to get used to it, for sure, in that it’s useful to not have to go through dependency hell installing things sometimes. It’s based on kernel features I don’t see Linus pulling out, so I think you’ll only see it more.

As someone who runs nix-only at home, I mostly use its underlying tech in the form of snaps/flatpaks, though. I use docker itself at work constantly, but at home, snaps/flatpaks tend to do the “minimize thinking about dependencies and building” bit but in a workflow more convenient for desktop applications.

The litter boxes were emergency bathrooms for shooter lockdowns. Some clever villain tied it to “identify as” rhetoric, and politicians ran with new ammo to beat up their current punching bag.

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Lol, the AI effect in practice - the minute a computer can do it, it’s no longer intelligence.

A year ago if you had told me you had a computer program that could write greentexts compellingly, I would have told you that required “true” AI. But now, eh.

In any case, LLMs are clearly short of the “SuPeR BeInG” that the term “AI” seems to make some people think of and that you get all these Boomer stories about, and what we’ve got now definitely isn’t that.

Toast with cinnamon, sugar and butter on top. Pro tip: put the butter, sugar and cinnamon on before you toast it - then it melts into the bread. This was my go-to growing up for being sick and having trouble eating. Feel better soon!

what do millennials use as sleep aids

I got hit by a “are you still there?” after 15 minutes of Futurama last night and they were almost right. They’re on to us

Oh wow, thanks! So, big question for us, if you’re down: if we also split your payment up along the different lemmy servers your account interacted with each month, would you see that as a benefit?

Great question! The reason for this poll is to ask if people feel that’s enough.

On a personal level, it’s not - as mentioned above, I hit more services and people I’d like to support than it’s reasonable to do a patreon/ko-fi for each, and it ends up being partially random chance on who gets support. But I’m curious if that’s a problem for other people’s on the Fediverse, and what they think about it if so - or if there are other problems we’re not even tracking on.

More loosely, the concept we’re playing with looks at the servers you interacted with and splits your monthly budget among them automatically, dropping the manual “will I subscribe to this server’s patreon?” or “will I make a donation today?” steps needed right now. But as far we know right now, that’s just solving me and Punty’s problem - it’d be cool to know other people saw this problem too.

Definitely the same concept, but our implementation didn’t require a browser plugin, and we worked on phones!

There’s been a lot of attempts at micropayment solutions, a ton of which we cribbed lessons from for sure. E.g., that’s why we didn’t try the “charge a little bit from a wallet at a time” approach, which has failed a ton of times because it’s exhausting to browse the Internet that way.

The tough part for me historically has been that I hit way more creators than I can donate to. Even if you break up everything into individual sites, then federate them, it’s a pain to have a ton of $5 subscriptions. So the thing OP and I worked on was a supplement - a monthly budget you set, say $20, that got split among all the creators and places you browsed each month, with places you browsed more getting a bigger cut. This seems like not a perfect answer, but maybe a good first approximation for a federated net, which is why we’re asking around to whether communities see a fit for what their goals are.

Thanks for the response!

A buddy of OP here who also worked on subless, for context. From my perspective, already lemmy.world publishes “how to donate” text, as do other servers, so the servers are kind of step one. Then there’s the actual developers writing the software behind them. After that, there’s creators that pop up in Fediverse communities who post their patreon links, ko-fi, etc. These are all people doing serious work that I’d like to support, and is in some cases more than you can just kind of do in your free time. So that’s where the drive comes from, for me.