I expected to see microbes here first. Insects have a slower reproduction cycle, so evolution should take longer.

Doing chemistry by mixing chemicals is like fumbling in the dark. You tend to have ridiculously low yield, because you can’t really control which reaction takes place. It’s just a game of probabilities, which makes this gamble really expensive.

Living cells are doing chemistry the right way by combining specific materials and making specific products. Enzymes are very picky, but with them you can actually control the reactions. Making enzymes is just next level complexity and a story for another time.

Maybe hundreds of years from now we can synthesize nutrients without involving any living cells. At that point, it could be seen as unethical to enslave, murder and eat billions of microbial cells. For the time being, our life still depends on other living things, so better get comfortable with having mixed feelings about survival.

Oh, that’s a very good point. Makes me wonder why Mozilla doesn’t talk about donations very much. Must be a strategic decision or something.

As someone who is severely allergic to ads, I really don’t like this transition, but I understand why they’re doing it.

Mozilla seems to be facing a tough problem. How do you make money when your core audience isn’t enough to support the company, but you can’t realistically pivot to a new audience without kicking out all of the old users. Would it be better if Mozilla just faded into irrelevancy and focussed on developing Thunderbird instead? The FOSS community would have to continue to support Firefox, which would slow down development to such an extent that it probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with the rest of the web.

In summary: You and me, we’re in the same tribe, and we hold the superior worldview. Those people over there in the out-group are wrong. They also do things the wrong way, because they aren’t in our tribe.

Hearing this sort of talk pulls some strings in the human mind. There’s this interesting default setting that says tribalism = TRUE.

I don’t have numbers that would directly address that. However, there are lots of statistics on the number of mobile users vs desktop users when it comes to the traffic in general. This trend has been clearly visible for about 15 years now.

Here’s something I found on a short notice. link

Not that many people use real computers any more. At work, you may need to use a computer, but you probably can’t change the browser. At home, you have the PCMR folks who use a computer and probably also care about browsers. Everyone else just uses a tablet or a phone for browsing the web.

Speaking of the web, most people interact with specific websites through an app and an API, so they don’t even launch the mobile browser until they have to visit a site that doesn’t have an app. The world has changed and browsers aren’t as relevant as they used to be.

Is this one of those cases where you would need to make a parallel universe and let it run for billions of years to prove this idea?

It is absorbed by the mind of the listener, and stored for later use in the memory. As old memories fade away, you could also say that eventually it gets destroyed in the memory.

🌲👋 🪨/🌞/🌋🪵🐈/🐣

Less confusing date formats were invented much later, so this is all you get.

Yeah, but the future seems bright.

I’ve sometimes thought about that. Maybe in an alternate reality there’s a someone with my face who isn’t held back by any sort of morality whatsoever. Once you open that door, you can totally start spreading the stupidest ideas you can think of, and you’ll find someone who believes it and becomes your devout follower. I have a feeling that Scientology came about as a result of this sort of thinking.

Mastodon devs were clearly aware of the quality of text people tend to write online. It’s a very fitting term IMO.

So, is this based on the model where infinite coffee make you immortal?

Mozilla also has a VPN, so that should provide some revenue. Might not be enough to let go of Google’s support, but at least it’s something.

It’s called research. You search for something, can’t find it, so you try again; hence the prefix.

Either way, NASA is already exploiting it. I guess, next they’ll find a way to glitch through the very fabric of the universe to teleport to a distant galaxy without moving at all or even using any energy.

Man, that is just such a cool little easter egg. Totally love it!

The idea of modern medicine is to sell chemical compounds that actually have an effect. It’s a philosophical and ethical thing. All products have a unique psychological effect that gets intertwined with their biochemical effect. If you can’t study them individually, it’s impossible to tell if the biochemical effect even exists at all. If your medicine relies heavily, or even entirely, on the psychological side, it’s no different than homeopathy. The idea of modern medicine is to be better than the old stuff that preceded it.

I prefer to think of this as an equation like this: Pm+Bm=Pp+Bp

Pm=psychological effect, medicine

Bm=biochemical effect, medicine

Pp=psychological effect, placebo = surprisingly big

Bp=biochemical effect, placebo = 0

If these sides are equivalent, the medicine is just as effective as placebo. If the medicine side is bigger, you’ll want to know how much of it comes from the P and B terms. In order to figure that out, you would need to know some values. Normally, you can just assume that Pm=Pp, but if you can’t assume that, it you’re left with two unknowns in that equation. In this case, you really can’t assume them to be equal, which means that your data won’t allow you to figure out how much of the total effect comes from psychological and biochemical effects. It could be 50/50, 10/90, who knows. That sort of uncertainty is a serious problem, because of the philosophical and ethical side of developing medicine.