Good catch, I think we've been bamboozled ladies and gentlemen. Well played OP

It's a national news story thats come to light due to a large number of otherwise healthy, fairly young workers getting sick and dying from silicosis. The suggestion to ban came directly from the occupational safety watchdog, who are tasked with keeping workers safe. https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/hazards/crystalline-silica-and-silicosis is pretty comprehensive.

In February they released a report (https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-02/decision_ris_-_managing_the_risks_of_crystalline_silica_at_work_-_for_publication_pdf.pdf) outlining exactly what you refer to, with 6 options for governments to consider. The ban on engineered stone is the most dramatic, and uses basically the same legal framework that was used to ban asbestos in the first place.

Essentially they have been screaming at stonemasons and employees for 5 years to no avail, compliance with health and safety regulations in this area is atrocious, and no matter what laws you pass, more and more people are going to get sick and die from a preventable disease if you leave the stuff on the market.

It's only in recent years that the real dangers of silicate dust have been understood and it's being banned for essentially the same reason asbestos was - it's too hard to manage safely, and the most exposed people (workers) have to be protected. Asbestos is dangerous because it can get embedded in lung cells and not be exhaled - silicate dust is similar. Makes sense to me to put it in the same category especially if some poor bastards are dying from it.

This is a good summary; as a reddit exile myself who exclusively used Sync, I think it's worth emphasising that Dawson has done an amazing job of making the transition from reddit to lemmy pretty seamless from an app design point of view. I can set my views and filters up identically as they were in the Reddit version of the app, and the lemmy experience becomes essentially identical to reddit.

There's definitely a conflict between "paid closed source app" and "FOSS fediverse", and there's arguments to be made about whether user revenue should be directed to server expenses to maintain communities or front end app development to attract more users, which I think will be interesting to see play out. But at the end of the day Sync makes lemmy "useable" in a way that replicates the reddit experience, which is what a lot of migrants were after - other apps (while arguably more feature rich in terms of the fediverse) just didn't quite hit the dopamine-feed the way Sync does.

I'm both impressed and concerned at the level of detail you supplied here, but...thank you? For some of the context

It sounds like a cursed item in D&D or something.

The Book of Faces Wondrous Item, very rare

This enchanted tome magically records the likeness each humanoid slain in its vicinity, preserving a snapshot of their life and memories. The book can be read to glean superficial information about it's subjects. As an action, you can tear a page from the book to summon a ghostly spirit of its subject, which will be magically compelled to answer questions. The spirit knows nothing the owner did not know in life.

The Demon Lord Elgor Ithym is said to have a keen interest in this book...

We lost our first good boy to this. One moment he was happy sprawled out on the floor, next howling in agony and dragging himself by his forelegs. Nothing the vet could do, described it as basically a major stroke for a cat. Just one of those freak things.

In Australia, "blinking yelloe" means "drive with caution" - roadway may be used bey pedestrians, slower traffic may have merged to faster, the traffic lights normal function might be impeded. Just basically a catch all for "be careful".

Having acid that it's very rare that you'd find a blinking yellow on a turn across pedestrians - you'd get green arrow or light, pedestrians get green walk, and driver waits for pedestrians. It's not rocket science. You don't turn on red though.

Then again we still have thrse fellas so maybe dont listen to us : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_turn

Ooh I know some of this!

Sauron was a Maia (lesser primordial spirit), who along with Morgoth (a fallen spirit formally known as Melkor) was at odds with essentially every other spirit and the general concepts of peace and tranquility that were sought by the creators of the universe. After Morgoth was defeated, Sauron inherited the role of the eponymous Dark Lord and sought to rule Middle-Earth in its entirety.

The Wizards were the Istar, a group of Maiar tasked by the Valar (greater spirits) and Manwe (the king of the Valar) to travel to Middle-Earth and aid the Free People in their fight against Sauron. They took the form of elderly men and roamed the lands to counter and subvert Saurons influence. Their mandate prevented them from open conflict, which is why they took on the role of advisors and supporters instead of just fighting Sauron head on or rallying armies to fight him. Their origins were unknown to any of the Free People, but the Elves for sure new that they weren't just Men - since they lived for thousands of years and had gifts that no mortal Men possessed.

Bombadil is likely another Valar, off in Middle Earth doing his own thing - in ancient ages many of the Valar visited or lived in Middle Earth, so it could be that he didn't return to Valinor and just hung around. His complete disinterest in intervening in the conflict is one clue, and the fact that he exceeds Sauron in raw power as the One Ring is completely mundane to him, whereas Gandalf fears that it will overpower him, is another.

Between Sabines training montage with a "blast shield down" helmet, and firing off anticipatory shots from a swivel gun, this episode was a love letter to A New Hope and I am totally here for it. Filoni manage to make the movies better every single time he touches the material.

The training scene in particular was a choreographical masterpiece when you consider the last time we saw something similar in live action - a young Luke able to instinctually repel training droid blaster shots as a mere novice. The scene with Sabine helps to show just how unlikely and exceptional that is. I also love the implication that Mandalorians in general have trouble surrendering to the will of the Force, as a warrior people it makes perfect sense that they would generally rail against anything else controlling or manipulating them.

Even little things like powering the ship and droid down to avoid detectoon, much like 3PO and the Falcon in Episode 5, just help to reinforce this idea that people do shit for reasons in this universe and I LOVE it. They even found time to give Ahsoka a stupid Anakin badass moment cutting a freaking starship in half with a lightsaber. I have had a giddy grin on my face for every episode of Ahsoka and hope they keep on with it.

I strongly, strongly suggest you revisit some of the preconceptions that led you here. I was going to instinctually retort, but instead took 5 minutes to read the relevant Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa#West_Africa. It is clear that the topic is more nuanced than I originally thought, so thank you for bringing that to my attention, but it's a crude and broad brush to imply that most slaves already existed in slavery prior to the Atlantic trade. There is also a significant difference between slaves in Africa who were exchanged between local groups in a wholly African context, versus slaves chained up and flung across the Atlantic with a 12% mortality rate and forced under a European slavery conception.

I suspect your response has rubbed others the wrong way, as it did myself, so consider this an attempt to find a common ground for dialogue - whatever the history of Africs prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, I think we can agree that what happened was utterly grotesque and an atrocity upon the history of our common humanity.

I envisage a world where your browsing Netflix, and based on past preferences some of the title cards are generated on the fly for you. Then based on what you click, the AI engine warms us and generates the film for you in real-time. Essentially indistinguishable from the majority of Hollywood regurgitation.

And because the script is just a series of autogenerated prompts, its like a choose your own adventure book, you can steer the narrative the way you want if you elect to. Otherwise it'll be good enough to keep most monkey brains happy and you won't even be able to tell the difference most of the time.

The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.

Definitely seems AGI related. Has to do with acing mathematical problems - I can see why a generative AI model that can learn, solve, and then extrapolate mathematical formulae could be a big breakthrough.

I mean if it is its clever - put a bunch of made up products out there to gauge interest without needing to invest any capital, then actualy make the products that garner the most attention. Makes way more sense than trying to manufacture and market things from scratch

We truly live in the stupidest timeline.

It is too easy for most unions to become corrupted by self interested parties. It's the same with any human endeavour. Relax the boundaries enough and people with less scruples than you will worm their way in.

There's needs to be legislative framework that protects the rights of every worker, every industry, everywhere as a baseline. Then construct sensible unions for various industries from there. Otherwise they become fragile, susceptible to personal influence - who's going to run against a 10 year incumbent union president?- it needs an iron core underlying it to protect workers rights.

16 years... Jesus that makes me feel old.

The whole pick of destiny soundtrack is fire though, I can never get enough Tenacious D

I saw one suggestion which was to so away with male and female competitions, and instead have "open" and "restricted" comps. Open would be available to anyone, male or female, while you could set up as many restricted comps as you needed for the particular sport or activity with whatever rules make sense. So the 100m sprint might have Open, Restricted - Testosterone, and Restricted - Height - with whatever T level or height in centimetres decided by the relevant authority. Whereas something like weightlifting might have Restricted - Weight as it's own class. The idea being any gender can compete provided provided meet the restrictions in place to make an interesting/fair competition within that bracket.

Showing him a modern blender hitting 30,000 rpm

I agree, you want bums in seats as quickly and effortless as possible. Your average user coming from reddit just wants an "all" feed they can use to curate their own front page, they don't really know, care, or want to learn about the plumbing underneath. The ones that do care will figure it out as theres plenty of resources available.

Knowing very little about the technical side - and speaking only from my experience trying to get my own account set up - I almost think the fediverse need a dedicated, standalone sign up instance (or series of instances) that has no posting enabled, but is automatically federated to the X most popular instances - so that apps and web interfaces can create simple default sign ups for new users without them needing to understand what instances even are.

Something like "lemmy.gateway" that can act as a home for the user account that then looks at the instances where the content actually happens, that can have high availability and redundancy in the event of server load on the popular instances, and that "just works" for your average reddit migrant so they don't have to go diving into instance details to dip their toe in the water. That way your "content instances" can go up or down without impacting new user signups, your apps can work to load popular posts even if what would normally be your home instance is down, and you can decouple things a bit - maybe your "gateway" lemmy instance can drop some code to run leaner since it doesn't have to worry about posting content.

To fund it you'd need some selfless souls, or perhaps agreement between major instances to shell out some revenue to host the sign up instance network, with the idea that getting users in to the fediverse generically is just as important as getting them on specific instances.

I have no idea if this is even possible but from a new user flow, if the intent is to maximise active users, you just want to get people "in" so they can eyeball, vote and post - then let learn how lemmy is different. Not the other way around.