Obviously we’d all die but I wonder how exactly. This would make a good question for Randall Munroe.

What are you doing, step stool?

Much of Europe (ie the rich parts) is free of terrestrial rabies because of such programs. Bats really get around, though.

I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.

This was, altogether, a remarkable experience - both in its sudden onset and its extraordinary course. It seemed to have resulted from some external toxic influence; I surmised a connection with the substance I had been working with at the time, lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. But this led to another question: how had I managed to absorb this material? Because of the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of the substance was absorbed through the skin. If LSD-25 had indeed been the cause of this bizarre experience, then it must be a substance of extraordinary potency. There seemed to be only one way of getting to the bottom of this. I decided on a self-experiment.

Exercising extreme caution, I began the planned series of experiments with the smallest quantity that could be expected to produce some effect, considering the activity of the ergot alkaloids known at the time: namely, 0.25 mg (mg = milligram = one thousandth of a gram) of lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.

From LSD: My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann. I will leave it to others to explain all the ways in which this is absolutely hair-raising.

It was 1943 and even in Switzerland fuel was not to be had. Incidentally, it was the same day that the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began.

Today, LSD would never be discovered. Guy didn’t even use gloves and lived to 102.

Publications in peer-reviewed journals are how a career in science is built. It’s impossible to measure the productivity of a scientist. What is done, is that one looks at their publications. How many publications do they have? How often are they cited? What is the quality of the journal?

This creates very bad incentives, leading to things like publication bias. It also means that you must publish in prestigious journals. You don’t have a choice but to accept their terms. Libraries don’t have a choice but to stock these journals. It’s a straight-forward monopoly racket. These publishers make fantastical profits.

All that money can be used for PR campaigns and lobbying to keep the good times rolling.

I prefer Threads.

You are a very brave person.

Defeatist opinion.

The commercial alternatives hope to make money with every additional user. They use AB testing and statistics to streamline the on-boarding and to increase engagement. The result may not be in the user’s interest (doom-scrolling, ragebait, …) but it works.

For a fediverse instance, any additional user is a cost, not the promise of money. Financially, you wouldn’t want that. Those who fund instances are giving a gift to the world for their own reasons. You can accept the gift or not. Those who keep instances running with donations will usually want to sustain the community of which they are part. They probably don’t want it to change very much.

So, I don’t think matters will change. Partly because the psychological engineering is antithetical to the fediverse ethos (as I see it, in my humble opinion). But mostly because the outcome we see is an inherent result of the incentive structure.

I hate that this is popular. This is a creationist level understanding of the big bang.

You ever use a spray can for a while and the can gets cold? It’s more like that.

Bitcoin.

It may be illegal to operate a bitcoin miner in Europe. That’s entirely possible. I don’t think the courts would go so far as to outlaw crypto in Europe via that route. But who knows.

the technology is similar in the relevant aspects

No. You can just turn off federation. You can make contracts with the instances you federate with. With crypto, you have to send the whole blockchain around, or else you don’t have crypto.

As for Meta, the problem is that the data they’re sharing is not public.

No. Look up what companies and people are fined for.

Any information that a user willingly makes public can be processed in any way

No! NO!!!

You may not process any personal data without a legal basis. It does not matter if public or not.

Certain sensitive personal data may not be processed at all, even with a legal basis. Except in certain circumstances listed in Article 9.

Still, the archival nature of decentralized communities is one of the primary objectives of the technology. It’s arguably the defining feature of any decentralized thing that no one controls everything so things are meant to stay “forever”. Otherwise Bitcoin would be completely ilegal since there’s no way to delete information there.

Any number of people here will happily tell you where to shove your illegal technology. In truth, the GDPR is explicitly meant to limit what may be done with existing technology.

With crypto, one can make use of some existing exceptions and perhaps create compliant apps. I’m not familiar with those. Much that stuff is not compliant. There isn’t a lot of enforcement.

So that’s my bad. I pointed out the issue with the right to erasure to highlight the problem, In truth, the probable violation happens when the data is shared. With e-mail, the user sends their own data, just like while clicking links. The transfer of data for lemmy federation is under the control of the instances involved. It might still be okay, like serving the data over the web. But that requires the user to know what’s going on.

If you could hand-wave these problems away so easily, Meta would not be paying those huge fines. What do you actually think that’s about?

I was going to reply with point by point why it either doesn’t apply to Lemmy or it follows GDPR

It does apply to lemmy and lemmy is not compliant. That is simply a fact as far as the courts have ruled so far.

Which one could argue is public forum primary use

One can argue a lot. But if such hand-wavy arguments work, then why do you think anyone ever has to pay fines or damages?

For this argument to work, you have to argue that erasing the precise personal data in question would infringe on someone else’s right to freedom of expression and information.

The original “right to be forgotten” was about links to media reports. The media reports themselves did not have to be deleted because of freedom of information, but google had to delete the links to them to make them harder to find. This is a narrow exception. Under EU law, data protection and these freedoms are both fundamental rights. They must be balanced. The GDPR dictates how. These exceptions will only apply where these freedoms are infringed in a big way.

At least, you have to do like reddit and anonymize the comments and posts. It could be argued that you actually may not even do more. Removing comments that someone else has replied to arguably makes their personal data incomplete. Reddit’s approach meets a lot of outspoken criticism on lemmy.

The problem is that the data is duplicated all over the federated instances. So, someone on your instance deletes their data, Other instances also delete their copies. What do you do if someone in the US refuses to delete and maybe gives you that argument about freedom of expression? That’s right. You pay damages to your user because you screwed it up.

That looks like the St. Petersburg Paradox. Much ink has been spilled over it.

The expected payout is infinite. At any point, the “rational” (profit-maximizing) decision is to keep flipping, since you wager a finite sum of money to win an infinite sum. It’s very counter-intuitive, hence called a paradox.

In reality, a casino has finite money. You can work out how many coin flips it takes to bankrupt it. So you can work out how likely it is to reach that point with a given, finite sum of money. Martingale strategies have already been mentioned.

That’s not true. Out of curiosity, where did you learn that?

It is a problem. If anyone complains or sues about GDPR compliance, they will get fined and/or have to pay damages.

There’s also other regulations, like the DSA. I’m fairly sure the GDPR isn’t the only legal problem.

That is entirely incorrect. It is general data protection regulation, not privacy regulation.

You are given certain rights over data relating to you. For example: you may have it deleted. Have you googled the name of a person? At the bottom, you will find a notice that “some results may have been removed”. Under the GDPR, you can make search engines delete links relating to you; for example, links to unflattering news stories (once you are out of the public eye).

That’s not correct. The GDPR explicitly gives “direct marketing” as an example of a “legitimate interest”.

The GDPR prohibits processing of personal data, unless there is a legal basis for it. Personal data covers a lot more than you think, as does processing.

What counts as a legal basis may be seen in Article 6 of the GDPR. Consent is one option, but it must be informed and freely given; a very high bar. If you have a legitimate interest, you may process data without prior consent. However, you must still provide the “data subject” with information and give them the option to opt out. They must tell you the legal basis, which they have done, but also what exactly that their interest is. (And a couple more things.) There should be a statement somewhere containing that information.

The GDPR gives “direct marketing” as an example of a legitimate interest. Some DPOs interpret the term extremely narrowly, though. It’s a contentious issue. The courts will work it out over the next few years.

Why does he need thermal goggles when he already has a thermal camera? smh poor wife