At first, the title of the post made me think that we killed all (possible) life on Mars, not just in the samples taken, just by having landed there and contaminated the planet. Now that would have been a true tragedy.

As long as they can go from their taxpayer-funded air-conditioned offices, to their taxpayer-funded air-conditioned limos, to their taxpayer-funded air-conditioned mansions, they’re good.

If it’s not Shrinkflation, it’s Diluteflation.

I occasionally see posts and news articles about how AriZona Tea Company has “held the line” and kept their giant cans of iced tea priced at 99 cents for so long.

Well, after drinking a few cans of the stuff recently, I’m almost certain they’re watering down their product. The tea is nowhere near as concentrated as it was a few years ago. There’s practically no flavor to it anymore.

Totally agree. Video has really gotten out of hand.

Personally, I hate how so much instructional material (of any kind) is posted in the form of YouTube videos. The same information could be posted in a far more compact and succinct form as a combination of text and still images. I can read far faster than most of these video “instructors” are able to convey useful facts. Plus, with a text, I can skip forward or back, and re-read key sections easily, without having to use a damn seek bar.

Also, does it not occur to these video posters that, by posting everything to YouTube, you’re putting all of your eggs in the same basket? YouTube may use multiple huge datacenters around the world, but how much of that video data is actually backed up? If a given datacenter is destroyed by a disaster, it would take a significant chunk of YouTube content with it. I’d much rather have the same information (in text form) spread across multiple, unrelated websites scattered around the world.

How big is this, in real numbers?

Agree with all of that. Blue LEDs, especially, have gotten way out of hand, and manufacturers have got to tone it down.

I think the biggest limiting factor here is the lack of RAM on that system.

If you run out of items to view on Lemmy, you can always go out and, like, engage with family, or hobbies, or grass-touching…

Thanks, Elon. This is why we can’t have good science.

Adding, I found an option in my Mastodon client to hide boosts from my time line. Which solves my original problem. 🙂

Ahhh. See, I didn’t realize the “@news” I was following on Mastodon was actually a Lemmy group. I though it was specific to Mastodon, and expected it would be a news repeater/aggregator. Didn’t know it would also include all responses to the news posts.

It goes with a larger confusion on my part about how Mastodon works, I guess.

Lemmy is like every social medium since the dawn of time: a cross-section of humanity… the good, the bad, and the ugly.

When I was a kid, and we had a power outage, we made do with kerosene lanterns and board games.

How times change.

Try to find an instance that’s local to your country or region.

Truth.

I have a box I meant to store my cat’s toys in, but she commandeered it for napping purposes.

Maybe, but Kentuckians have been voting against their own best interests for years.

I have to wonder whether Musk knew Meta had the trademark, and intentionally used it in order to rile them up.

… Nah, that would require actual planning on his part.

Age 30?

Pfft. Amateur.

I half expect that, if enough programmers use ChatGPT-written code verbatim, someday it’s going to lead to Skynet. I mean, what’s to stop ChatGPT from inserting bits of extra code to be used for its own distributed processing botnet?