“If you want to restore this, like, ‘primordial’ forest, don’t you also want to restore our relationship with that forest?” he asked. “Like — what’s your relationship to a transgenic chestnut?”

This is a quote by Patterson in the article, and it basically sums up this whole article.

No, no one is trying to restore a “primordial forest”, they’re trying to restore a tree that was the most common tree in America 50 years ago, which produces nutritious food that anyone can eat.

People don’t need to have an indigenous relationship with a plant to benefit from it or want to see it in place; you do not have to be Georgian or Armenian to love apple trees.

This story was such nonsense, because of how hard it tried to make this a story about indigenous peoples.

Every town I’ve ever visited on the eastern seaboard has chestnut streets and chestnut lanes because these trees were everywhere. My dad grew up when the blight had finally reached a tipping point and was quickly changing that; it wasn’t that long ago.

I respect everything Patterson is saying in this article, but not reintroducing the American Chestnut because it fails to right colonial wrongs is like not brushing your teeth because it doesn’t stop you from getting cancer.

In any event, if they’re reintroducing chestnuts I’m getting a couple for my property. I ate my first chestnut in my 40s (in Spain) and I’d love to have some in my retirement.

I’d recommend it! I have a lovely Japanese chestnut in my yard that I harvest every fall, I make chestnut puree and that shit is to die for.

For some of us at some times in our lives, having a relationship with two people is less work. It requires much more communication, better scheduling, and much more attention to your partners’ feelings … but that might be a good investment of time anyhow, and often gets overlooked.

I find that having multiple partners helps me appreciate each partner much more, for themselves – it’s easy to mix up how much you love just having a partner and being loved, with how you actually feel about that person. Poly gives you the distance and contrast to see your partners clearly, and that can be really special.

Yeah, this is my dynamic as well. My partner and I have been together for a decade and poly from the beginning. It’s not at all a secret, but people are so used to monogamy as a norm that they often just think our other partners are super close friends that hang out at our house a lot.

I’ve been in poly relationships most of my adult life, around 15 years now. I’m certainly familiar with the type of relationship you describe, but the long term, stable poly relationships are the ones that have been poly from the get go.

I don’t tend to date people who are “opening things up” in a previously monogamous relationship, because being someone’s learning experience is a bummer.

I’ve been in poly relationships for years. They work really well for me and my significant others, but we are pretty discreet about it because folks tend to be huge assholes about it.

Generally, you don’t see the poly relationships that work great; mostly, people see the type of scenario one of your other commenters described because the stable relationships are less visible.

We don’t! That’s the joy of it, just like people do, our algorithm will constantly waffle back and forth and argue with itself over whether these things are salads

I know, I was being humorous but it is in fact the way most categorization works. Very seldom is it a taxonomy; the way we recognize faces, voices, shapes, etc … it’s all probabilistic.

What we need is a salad categorizing multilayer neural network

So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it’s a salad.

However, I like to think that dishes’ ingredients aren’t a taxonomic thing, they’re a probabilistic thing. In other words, there’s no such thing as “not salad” or “salad”, only shades of saladness.

• Serve it cold? Ok it’s saladier

• It’s made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still

• Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish

• They’re mixed together? Even more salad like

• They’ve got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it’s very likely a salad!

… and so on. To me, your SO’a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm

It’s a good objective, but it would take a lot to make it happen. It’s significantly more challenging for tech workers to effectively unionize en masse for several reasons:

• Tech isn’t monopsonistic, or even close to it; there isn’t a single large employer… even the biggest tech companies employ only a relatively small fraction of the tech workforce. That means separate unionization efforts at thousands of big companies, not at one.

• Tech job functions are much more widely varied than “delivery driver”; job responsibilities differ greatly, complexity and education requirements differ greatly, workplace expectations differ greatly … think of the difference between help desk, front end dev, network security engineering, data science and DBA. Collective bargaining is harder the more varied the needs of the collective are.

• Job mobility is really high in the tech sector … in other words, tech employees (by and large) have access to many prospective employers (especially with the prevalence of remote work), and tech employers to a wide geographic pool of talent. That means if your San Francisco office seems on the path to unionization, you can shift work to your Chennai office.

• It also means that, when the working conditions at a tech company suck, a lot of tech workers can easily jump ship. It’s hard to get a union going when your voters can easily quit and go work someplace nicer, rather than take the more difficult path of staying and trying to force your employer to improve.

Again, I think highly of unions and would really like to see more effective unionization efforts in tech – I just want folks to go into it eyes wide open and intelligently, vs throwing up their hands and saying, “Why don’t tech workers unionize?”

I’m around 11 years and a few hundred thousand karma. At this point I use reddit on desktop for a couple of specific communities that haven’t made it over here.

All my mobile / time killing stuff has moved to lemmy.

It mostly just annoys the crap out of me, honestly. Glad to be in a cool new place but goddammit reddit, you didn’t have to do this crap.

I’m guessing there was a fair amount of prompting scene by scene. It’s very impressive technically but it definitely falls flat at the moment

Embedded in this article

Here’s the thing though: I want the Fediverse to have enough scale so it’s got most of the content I want, and I can spend most of my time here.

Otherwise I’m still relying on Reddit, etc – so I want scale.

So here’s the thing: there are quite a few free and open source technologies Google adopted that have remained free and open source… I’m not convinced Google was trying to kill XMPP, and even if it were, the fact that corporations can often successfully kill non proprietary standards isn’t a great argument against wanting corporations to adopt those standards.

If content from Threads is available to the Fediverse and vice versa, then there is certainly a risk that 95% of users end up on Threads (e.g., because the sign up experience is better, because it’s conceptually simpler for the non tech savvy, and so on) … And that, by defederating, Threads could force the remaining 5% to move to Threads to continue seeing content.

The issue with that threat is that it has nothing to do with Threads federating. Guess what? The moment Threads launched, it had 5x as many users as Lemmy does. If simply being big and having a lot of content is what allows a platform to scale to the point that it can use the network effect to kill competition, large social media companies have that advantage whether they federate or not.

Worried that Threads will launch features that aren’t accessible unless you’re on their instance? Well, if they aren’t federated… That’ll happen anyway.

What Threads joining the Fediverse does, is provide ~1M users on the fediverse access to content from ~5M more users, and means that everyone leaving a platform like Reddit in favor of a platform like Lemmy sees more content. That is 5x more helpful to getting Lemmy to scale than it is for Threads.

That’s true, but also bear in mind most of reddit’s active monthly users are barely interacting with the site (e.g., through clicking in off a search result, or following a link).

The average user engagement per day is in the single digit minutes, and the average post / comment count per day is <1… I know I used reddit a lot more than that.

So as the numbers drop further in July, consider that the share of highly engaged, highly active, content creating users has likely dropped by far more.

Don’t worry, PwC will make a ton of money when they’re asked to help cut costs after this crashes and burns.