People who say that are generally talking about the signup where you have to pick an instance. And then there’s the worry over which other servers yours federates with. If you isolate your attention to a single instance, then all those worries go away.
The same already happens on the fediverse in regards to mastodon itself. A lot of people discuss the fediverse almost wholly in terms of mastodon.
They used it in a perfectly acceptable and understandable way. The definition you’re describing as sarcastic is an official meaning of the word. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patronize
MOXIE is a Scale Model for a Future Big MOXIE
To launch from Mars, a small crew of human explorers will need 25 to 30 tons of oxygen, or about the weight of a tractor-trailer! To make that much oxygen would require a 25,000 to 30,000 watt power plant. The Perseverance power system only provides about 100 watts, so MOXIE can only make a small fraction of the oxygen that a future “Big MOXIE” would need to make.
In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we’d need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That’s not trivial.
Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.
We can’t breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We’d need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.
But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn’t just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.
The point of books like this is to underline areas where we’re still woefully ignorant to guide future study. This isn’t just complaining. It’s taking stock of what we still need to learn.
You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues?
Scientists catalog what we know and don’t know and try to chip away at the list of things we don’t know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don’t know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don’t know.
The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:
No one has been conceived in low gravity, no fetuses have developed in low gravity, so we simply don’t know if there is a problem. Astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and no one knows how that plays out long term
I was shocked to learn that no one really knows how to construct a long-term habitable settlement for either the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are lots of hand-wavy ideas about lava tubes and regolith shielding. But the details are just… not there.
For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.
Space colonization may happen, but it’s incredibly doubtful that it’ll happen in our lifetimes.
But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me.
The question was do video games improve your life. I would argue you are the only person who can answer that question. This isn’t really a scientific question because its purely subjective. You’d need to narrow it down and define some criteria before you could try implementing a study for it.
If video games really were an unqualified good
I don’t think any sensible person would try to argue that. Nothing is an unqualified good. Watching 150 hours of tv would be just as bad as spending that time playing video games (video games would probably be better because at least you’re getting more brain stimulation). You can form unhealthy habits with anything. Video games are like any other hobby; you have to balance them with other hobbies/responsibilities. It’s good to know exactly what effects certain things like video games can have on your mind and body, but I don’t think its that useful to compare time spent with one hobby/responsibility to time spent with some other hobby/responsibility. And it always seems like only certain things are compared like that. People rarely ask if watching tv is good for their health, even if they do it more than you or I play video games. Why would playing guitar be better than playing a video game? What makes video games the lowest value hobby? (sorry this got kinda ranty. This sparked a lot of things in me i guess)
I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.
100% This article was a waste of time. I’m not disagreeing on that. Your comment gave me more to think about than that article.
I agree that this is ridiculous. But I think the issue is that the “middle men” are the retail stores that are used to doing retail things like lowering the price of older goods. Digital storefronts don’t have anybody going over “inventory” and checking if it needs to be marked down. And corporations being corporations, they don’t care about this oversight. Why spend time/money on lowering the amount of money they’ll make?
Thanks for pointing out Ladybird. It’s a pretty exciting project. But the author isn’t early in “announcing” anything. This isn’t a press release. He posted on his own blog about a pet project. That’s what the web is supposed to be. Not everything has to be for a big purpose or compete with everything else.
A one-man project starting from scratch is not going to be viable in this day and age.
It’s a pet project; it doesn’t need to be “viable”.
I think this attitude is part of the reason why we have so few browsers. Every time someone tries to start their own browser, even just for fun, a lot of the response is just bitching about how big and complex browsers are and how the effort to start a new one is wasted. It makes it so that people interested in writing their own browser (for fun or profit) are less likely to share about it and probably less likely to pursue it seriously
They are different because most users weren’t aware of XMPP. They weren’t making a conscious choice to use an open standard. The fediverse, on the other hand, has grown specifically because people are seeing the value of an open ecosystem.
When google started removing XMPP support, users weren’t aware and didn’t care (other than losing contact with a few holdouts). If Meta implements AP support and then removes that support or modifies it so that it breaks some of expectations of the fediverse, most users will move to instances that don’t use Meta extensions. Meta can not take your instance or make it use their extensions, so an open fediverse will always exist.