Let's say you have a cow. The cow had a baby, and it's producing milk, but more than the calf or your family need. So you start selling the excess milk.

It's good money! Soon you buy another cow, and another. Eventually you can't take care of them all, so you hire people to help you. Yay!

After a while you realize that waiting for the cows to be impregnated by your bull means they are not producing milk as much as they can. So you start forcefully impregnating the cows so they are always pregnant or producing milk.

The calves are drinking a lot of your milk, so you decide to kill them as soon as possible. You don't know what to do with the dead calves, so you start marketing them as "veal", a delicacy!

A lot of your process is still manual, so you buy machinery that increases your productivity by 100x. You're still paying your workers the same amount, even though they're now responsible for producing 100x more.

One day you realize there's too much milk in the market. If you sell it all, the price will drop too much. So you dump thousands of gallons of milk in the river, to keep the prices stable. You couldn't give them away to people in need, that would still affect the market!

You're still not selling enough (though you have more money that you could spend in your lifetime). So you buy some politicians so the government says that milk is essential, the only way to absorb calcium, and it should be in every school. People are convinced they need milk, even though it's from another species and even though humans don't need milk after a couple years of age.

That's why I hate capitalism.

• Ethical reasons: hundreds of billions of animals are killed every year (not counting fish), after living a miserable and short life.
• Environmental: greenhouse emissions (CO2 and methane), deforestation for pastures, water pollution, are all caused by animal agriculture. If everyone went vegan we'd need only 25% of the land we currently use for agriculture.
• Health: there is some evidence that meat causes cancer, and convincing evidence that processed meat causes cancer. Also, the use of antibiotics for animals can lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Cow farts are methane, which are a more aggressive form of greenhouse gas, though with shorter lifespan.

Here's more info about meat and the environment.

Fun fact: you can convert from miles to kilometers using the Fibonacci sequence:

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 35

• 5 miles = 8 kilometers
• 21 miles = 35 kilometers
• 10 miles (2 + 8) = 16 kilometers (3 + 13)

So this means 1 mile = 1 kilometer.

O O

^ this is a Venn Diagram showing people who would fall for that scam, and people who would be able to figure out how to buy Bitcoin if their lives depended on it.

You realize most atrocities in history were done "just following the law", right?

My favorite comment about this from Mastodon: "X is just a sans serif swastika".

ffmpeg is written by Fabrice Bellard, who's one of the most underrated programmers in the world (he also wrote QEMU). It's probably the best tool out there, still actively maintained, and most commercial apps are probably using it under the hood for any kind of conversion.

I've been using Alacritty for a while. It's fast and does everything I need.

Has anyone played it on the Deck yet? What's the experience like?

Love this!

I also have a MUD story... back in 1993 I lived in Brazil, and there were no commercial ISPs, so you couldn't have internet even if you wanted to pay for it. Only universities were connected to the internet.

A friend of mine was in college studying computer science, and he had a "special number" that he could dial to get access from home. The number was unlike any other I've seen before. He shared the login ("students") and password ("students93") with me, and told me I could use it sparingly.

I was 15 at the time, and I started playing a MUD. The first day I played for 30 minutes. The second day, for a couple hours. Soon I was spending 8 hours a day playing MUD, and I started dreading the phone bill. Long distance calls where super expensive back then in Brazil, and even a landline would cost as much as a car!

After a month, no bill came. I waited another couple weeks, and I finally decided to call the phone company and ask how much it would cost to call the "special number".

"Sir, this number doesn't exist", was the answer.

Well, it worked for me! I kept using it, playing that MUD for 8-12 hours every day. Eventually, when 1994 arrived, my password stopped working. I tried "students94" and I was in. I only had telnet and ftp access, but that was enough to play MUDs and discover a whole new world.

Eventually in 1995 the password stop working again, and trying "students95" didn't work. I started using BBSs, and eventually ran my own for a few months. In 1996 I went to college, and the first commercial ISP opened in the city where I was. I was one of their first clients.

Related: every time you shuffle a deck of cards you get a sequence that has never happened before. The chance of getting a sequence that has occurred is stupidly small.

I just created https://lemmy.studio/ for music-related discussions.

We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective." — Kurt Vonnegut

You hire more people.

Fun fact: if you search for copyrighted material in Google and they show that a link was removed due to a DMCA takedown, you can click on the DMCA link to see the original request, which includes the original URL, which is usually still up.

I worked for a startup that had as main investor a company called InterTrust. Our office was inside their building.

InterTrust was a patent portfolio that belonged to Sony and Philips. All they did was sue people. One day they were able to sue Apple on some stupid patent, and there was much rejoicing at the office.

Everyone should be vegan. It's great for your health, for the environment, and more importantly, it would save more than a trillion (yes, with a T) lives every year.

In a hundred years we'll look back and be ashamed of what we did to animals.

So they expect less than 4166 API calls per user per month, or 138 per day? That doesn't sound like much.

I just loaded reddit.org and my browser did 57 XHR requests. I clicked on a post with zero comments and it went up to 84. Clicked on a second one with 430 comments and I'm already at 137 requests...

How many people do you think would be needed?

It's less than you imagine. As long as the sampling is random and unbiased, assuming 100 million Republicans, a sample size of 1000 should be enough for a 3% margin of error with a 95% confidence level.

You're halfway there, you just need to get smarter now!