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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.





  • 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.