FaceDeer

Sure, but are any of these “don’t worry guys I torrented a database dump, it’s safe now” folks going to go to the trouble of actually doing that? They’re not even downloading a full backup, just the current version.

You need to devote a lot of bandwidth to keeping continuously up to date with Wikipedia. There’s only a few archives out there that are likely doing that, and of course Wikimedia Foundation and its international chapters themselves. Those are the ones who will provide the data needed to restart Wikipedia, if it actually comes to that.

And not enough blame is being heaped on Obama, who was president at the time and should have prevented it from happening in the first place.

I, too, started out on kbin and ended up migrating to an mbin instance. I sent Ernest some money via that Koffi thing he had and I don’t regret it - I hope he found the funds useful, whatever it is that happened to him in the end. He kicked off an alternative to Lemmy and that’s super important for a distributed decentralized system like the Fediverse, you can’t have just one client for it.

My point is that the alternative isn’t “no solution”, it’s “the much better database dump from Internet Archive or Wikimedia Foundation or wherever, the one that a new Wikipedia instance actually would be spun up from, not the one that you downloaded months ago and stashed in your closet.”

The fact that random people on the Internet have old copies of an incomplete, static copy of Wikipedia doesn’t really help anything. The real work that would go into bringing back Wikipedia would be creating the new hosting infrastructure capable of handling it, not trying to scrounge up a database to put on it.

I hope he did, because if he didn’t then that means we’re inside his dream too.

In which case we need to make sure he never wakes up.

He’s okay, it’s the woman who’s in trouble here.

Bye, Ralph.

Force Lightning is a Sith technique, not a Jedi one. Unscientific!

The problem with this solution is that it leaves out the most important part of Wikipedia of all; the editors. Wikipedia is a living document, constantly being updated and improved. Sure, you can preserve a fossil version of it. But if the site itself goes down then that fossil will lose value rapidly, and it’s not even going to be useful for creating a new live site because it doesn’t include the full history of articles (legally required under Wikipedia’s license) and won’t be the latest database dump from the moment that Wikipedia shut down.

Such short memory. If Kissinger getting the Nobel Peace Prize didn’t “kill” it then Obama comes nowhere close.

Even if saying this causes Trump to squash RFK Jr.'s efforts to destroy Covid vaccination, and result in even more MAGA infighting in the process?

It may not have been ball-gargling, it may have been an attempt to recruit one faction of crazy (Trump) to do battle with another faction of crazy (RFK Jr.).

I’m entirely in favor of sowing discord within the Trump administration’s many flavors of crazy.

AI has been a thing since 1956.

If it’s substrate dependent then that just means we’ll build new kinds of hardware that includes whatever mysterious function biological wetware is performing.

Discovering that this is indeed required would involve some world-shaking discoveries about information theory, though, that are not currently in line with what’s thought to be true. And yes, I’m aware of Roger Penrose’s theories about non-computability and microtubules and whatnot. I attended a lecture he gave on the subject once. I get the vibe of Nobel disease from his work in that field, frankly.

If it really turns out to be the case though, microtubules can be laid out on a chip.

This is where having unusual fetishes pays off, so the software has no idea you’re watching something “pornographic.”

Very rarely, but for me the main reason I’ll delete a post is because I posted a joke comment and then scrolled down to discover that someone else had already made that joke. Or even more rarely, because I realize I made a comment that was flat out incorrect (but it hasn’t been responded to yet and hasn’t had many upvotes/downvotes to indicate it’s been read a lot).

Otherwise, I leave all my comments up. I want AI to align with my values so I am glad they’re in the training sets.

Hope is a powerful thing.

The Supreme Court has made their decision; now let them enforce it!

I remember back then coming across a proposed “constitution” someone had posted on the Internet for one of these sea-steaded micronations. It was presented as a contract rather than a constitution, every citizen was supposed to literally sign on to it (or be treated as a non-citizen). It was zany. Hundreds of pages, with all sorts of minutiae. The main bit I remember was the rather large section that was the equivalent of the American second amendment, it had detailed rules about what kinds of landmines one was allowed to put on one’s property.

A constitutional right to place landmines, on a seastead micronation that would no doubt have rather constrained living space.

I’m generally in favour of personal liberties and all that, I can see how libertarianism can appeal as something that seems like a reasonable idea. But it’s so easy for it to just go careening wildly off the edge of reasonableness into territory like this.

Yup. I’m using both of them and they both have their downsides. For now having them both means the disappointments kind of cancel out, though.