xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words

This is great + well-deserved, plus it has the side benefit of making some of the world's worst people really, really mad.

The tourist-y parts of it are pretty much all newly rebuilt anyway; there's not much of the original wall left at Mutianyu or Simatai or wherever.

Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.

Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.

(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)

The good news is that Iceland won’t have to go around apologizing for its name anymore.

Can’t wait until my King Arthur AI-Generated Flour turns out to be a 5 pound bag of uncut cocaine.

This is wonderful. Churches are one place where the 1st Amendment is so mighty that even the current Supreme Court would be reluctant to weaken it for the sake of politics; they can teach whatever they like and Ron DeSantis can’t do a damn thing about it, and I hope they take full advantage of that.

(Perhaps some progressive white churches might join them in teaching about Black history and gender issues and other stuff students are no longer allowed to learn about in school)

The Stardewification of everything continues - can’t wait until Half-Life 3 finally comes out and it turns out that Black Mesa has purchased a dilapidated farm in the countryside that they’ve taken Gordon Freeman out of stasis to restore for them.

I hope they make it - snow leopards seem to be in the gray area in between endangered species which humans can + will spare no expense to keep alive, like pandas and kakapo, and endangered species that are almost certainly done for, like the Vaquita and the Javan rhinoceros.

“All right, you look like a future pedophile in this picture, number 1. Number 2, it doesn’t even have a first name, it just says AppLovin!”.

Yeah, Bribercutter has really gone downhill since the NYT acquisition

It’s about ads. The great thing about putting videos on YouTube is that Google does the work of selling ad slots for you, the not-so-great thing is that because those advertisers are actually Google’s customers, if they think they might be upset to see their ad running in your video, they’ll err on the side of pulling it.

But I daresay if Russell Brand had advertisers working with him directly, most of them would also be suspending their relationships with him right now; nobody wants anything to do with this sort of allegation.

“Hammerskins” sounds like a bunch of guys who hang around smashing each other’s genitals with hammers

So this is why Elon is suddenly more upset than usual about bots

I don’t work for anybody, and I don’t know what list of talking points you think I’m repeating other than the specific assertion that Germany shouldn’t have shut down its nuclear plants.

I could just as well accuse you of astroturfing for the coal power lobby.

But since you’re accusing me of being a shill anyway: yes, nuclear power is clean and safe and our refusal to embrace it has cost us decades of progress in reducing carbon emissions + is continuing to do so now. The anti-nuclear lobby has a tremendous amount of blood on its hands and I’m not the least bit ashamed to be on the opposing side to them.

So we’re currently at the ‘apology that actually makes things worse’ phase, which means just a few more days until ‘unconditional surrender but even so nobody will ever trust you again’

Sure, but nevertheless they’re burning a lot more coal than they would be if they hadn’t pointlessly shut down their nuclear plants.

“We were able to grow enough soybeans to replace half of the whale meat we were eating, but we can’t replace the other half yet because even though we have plenty of lentils, we hate lentils and don’t want to eat them anymore”

Nuclear output 12.2021: 5599.8 GWh
Brown coal output 8.2023: 5422.0 GWh
Black coal output 8.2023: 2049.2 GWh

So if you, y’know, hadn’t shut down those nuclear plants, you’d be burning 1/4 as much coal as you actually are.

Germany of course is the country that recently shut down a bunch of nuclear plants + temporarily (we hope) replaced them with coal.