I saw a show that detailed one once (in California, I believe). Very cool stuff, and certainly more efficient than WALL-E.

That was insensitive on my part considering the man is a convicted rapist. I should have thought about that. Mia culpa.

That is stupid. If Trump tried to beat a woman she would kick his ass.

In some municipalities they actually do have people mix all the trash and recycling and they have a really cool automated system of sorting it out on their end. It is much more efficient than having people do their own sorting.

I am not sure why this is not more commonplace. It probably requires a large investment in all those machines, and here in the Midwest we tend to contract stuff out to the lowest bidder rather than see the value of more efficient recycling. When the system is designed for people to do their own sorting, spending a small amount to encourage better sorting probably saves them money (if it works).

Also, I doubt it works very well. The company that came up with this is probably courting municipalities around the country claiming their system will reduce costs. The AI bubble will have no shortage of strange AI applications that eventually fizzle out.

We haven't invented WALL-E yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

There are certainly problems with recycling (including the plastic industry using it as a greenwashing strategy), but it's still much better than just throwing everything in the trash.

While most the plastic people recycle doesn't actually get recycled (and products made from recycled plastic are almost never made from 100% recycled plastic), metals are actually very recyclable. Furthermore, extracting metals from the earth is extremely environmentally hazardous, poorly regulated, and sometimes wrecks an ecosystem for generations by poisoning drinking water.

Just because the benefits of recycling have been greatly exaggerated doesn't mean that it's not a much better alternative than sending everything straight to the landfill. The biggest problem with recycling is that we don't subsidize it enough and we don't tax manufacturers heavily for producing stuff that's not renewable. The basic idea of recycling is a good one. The problem is that we have let industry take the lead rather than environmental regulators (not that we even have those right now).

Despite that, if you don't recycle just because it's not nearly as effective as it should be, that's really a dick move. Recycling is better than the alternative (not recycling). You gotta do what little you can.

Open source is particularly resistant to enshittification. Red Hat and Canonical try to enshittify Linux, and then swoops in AlmaLinux and Mint.

I would just not use AI in schools. Likewise, I would only have computers in a single computer lab.

We keep looking to technology to create educational shortcuts but have any of these shortcuts actually worked out? Over the last 40 years we have put more and more computers in schools and kids have become less literate, lost the ability to spell, and we've reached this bizarre time in history where it's become common to distrust basic science. The main things computers have brought to K-12 education are amazingly efficient ways to cheat and avoid actual learning.

This is just not true. With AI comes the ability to AVOID learning any of those things.

We need more teachers. That's how we improve the success rate. That's what prestigious private schools do to prepare kids for prestigious colleges. You provide small classrooms and make tutors available.

You are conflating education with vocational training. Treating education as vocational training is one of the major problems that got us into this mess.

Up until the last couple hundred years, having people hyper-specialize worked wonders to construct the modern civilization we enjoy. It didn't matter if a fletcher had a basic understanding of economics because he had no say. Likewise, in China they can get away with treating education as vocational training because having a broad education doesn't do a person any good (it's probably depressing, because it makes them aware of how shitty their situation is).

In societies that elect their leaders, the only thing preventing incompetent grifters from seizing control is a broadly educated populace.

Just look at how many people here on ./ are experts in highly complex fields—programmers, engineers, sysadmins, etc. And then look at how many of these dudes are complete idiots when discussing any topic outside their field of expertise.

So I guess that's a long way of saying, "You don't worry about teaching essential tools, you teach foundational concepts." Teach kids symbolic logic in elementary school. Teach them foreign languages in elementary school (most people don't really understand grammar until they learn a foreign language). Teach them how to write with a pencil and paper. Give them more teachers so they can learn these things while getting individualized attention.

As a final example, think of music theory. I have known tons of musicians who learned how to play a specific instrument, repeating songs written by others. Sometimes they're damned good at it. But they can't play other instruments, can't write their own songs, and haven't the faintest clue how to improvise. I have also known tons of musicians well versed in music theory. They can play any instrument (although technique will vary depending on instrument), write songs on any instrument, and improvise on any instrument within minutes of picking it up. Why? Because they didn't learn to use an essential tool, they learned a fundamental concept. If you're starting a band, which musician would you prefer?

Computers in school are just another example of money wasted. Unless it is computer class, computers have only been detrimental and any benefits they provided were not commensurate with their cost. Schools would have been better off hiring more teachers than buying computers.

It really doesn't make sense to use Windows or macOS these days. Hardware now outlasts software by entirely too long. If you want to get the most out of your hardware, Linux is pretty much the only choice.

Most people don't upgrade their hardware because it's faulty or too slow to actually do the tasks they need. They upgrade because Microsoft and Apple intentionally drop support and cripple things. It's downright wasteful. As more and more software becomes web apps it makes less sense to use MS or Apple in business settings.

"Matt Mullenweg regrets an accidental moment of honesty that revealed that the entire WordPress 'community' is a sham."

This asshole wants all the benefits of foss and all the benefits of proprietary systems. He lied for years, telling the public that WordPress was controlled by a community-led foundation. He did that because it attracted developers and users (a shitload of them). All the while those developers and users weren't buying into a community-led project, they were helping Automattic create a crippleware platform.

That he accuses other companies of "free-riding" for taking advantage of a supposedly open platform just shows how clueless he is. He's a spoiled brat who thinks he's entitled to be a billionaire. The guy didn't even make WordPress, he just latched on to the guy who forked it from some other project and then took over as some perverse wannabe cross between Jobs and Torvalds (clearly a failure because unlike Jobs, he has no idea what an elegant product looks like, and unlike Torvalds, he has no idea what elegant code looks like). The only reason it worked is because of the big lie he accidentally spilled the beans on: the open source community propped him up because they took him at his word when he said it was a community-led project.

But it really is that simple. We've known about this for decades. The most developed countries during that time had some form of representative government, and we did what people often do when they receive a horrible diagnosis. We pretended it wasn't happening.

We could have shifted to more renewable forms of energy. We could have stopped all rural and suburban development and lived in cities that used public transportation as the primary means of getting around. We could have made a strong push for urban gardening, reduced our dependency on livestock, and fed our cows antacids. We could have done a lot of things, but they wouldn't have allowed boomers to maximize the pleasure they extracted out of life, so we didn't.

If there was a solution that didn't threaten the interests of the fossil fuel industries, then we would have done it. Nuclear power is certainly something we can do, but nuclear power alone will not save us. If the entire world went all in on nuclear power the same time France did, that certainly would have helped. But there's still steel, concrete, planes, cars, natural gas, and a shitload of other greenhouse gas producers.

Human history is full of examples of civilizations that collapsed because they failed to consider the long-term consequences of destroying their environment. Deforestation, water management, the tragedy of the commons, over harvesting game, etc. Now we're doing it at a global scale and risking the survival of all humanity.

Good luck with "geoengineering" and "high-tech approaches." If we were that advanced we would be doing it.

I'm certainly not going to argue that the war on drugs has been conducted ethically, logically, effectively, or efficiently. But I'll also never argue in favor of decriminalized or legalized meth.

One of the biggest problems with we have with meth is that we have been so undiplomatic with China and Mexico that the former has taken a page out of the opium wars and exports the chemicals required to produce meth and fentanyl to the latter. Our ability to take on the cartels has also been stymied by our horrible treatment of Mexico. As the Chinese found out during the opium wars, prohibition is tough when powerful external enemies want to use addiction to cause you pain.

The above is just one of many factors that must be considered, but I think it just reinforces my point that we can't look at drug prohibition as a binary problem. When it comes to regulating chemicals—any chemical—we need to be very specific. We need to regulate chemicals that are used and get unearthed during hard rock mining, like arsenic. We need to regulate greenhouse gasses that are causing the destruction of this planet. We need to regulate pharmaceutical drugs that are only safe when taken under specific conditions. We need to regulate chemicals that are used in the production of food or as foodstuffs themselves. Likewise, we need to regulate recreational drugs, and the regulation for each recreational drug ought to be specific to that drug. Marijuana prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, has proven to be more negative than legalization (with specific regulations). I cannot imagine a scenario where meth legalization causes less loss of life, less suffering, and less security than prohibition.

Meth is about as common as moonshine today, but it's not nearly as common as alcohol during prohibition.

The meth lab in your condo complex got busted for a reason.

Relevant to the story here:

wiki