Dude that’s not even close to the most insane part. They expect one in every 8 humans on the whole earth to play EVERY DAY.

The government simply doesn’t understand technology. If someone said “I bought a book, but after 6 years the publisher came in and stole my copy and burned it” they can understand that. But a single player game, which is in many ways the same as a book, these old politicians just think “spoiled millennials just want free stuff handed to them. Stop playing games and grow up”. No one would say that about a book.

I want to be able to enjoy my private, legally purchased, leisure activity without the risk that the publisher steals it from me through deceptive practices. Is that really too much to ask for?

Lol the place that must not be named.

It’s a numbers game. Getting engagement and knowing your audience are skills. The fediverse is a small place compared to meta. Being a big player in the fediverse for most posters is like being in the best team in a college league. Meta joining with 500-2000x the users is like suddenly having to compete at a national professional level. Certainly a few players have the skill, but most will get benched in no time.

Maybe I’m wrong and I hope that I am, but I certainly know most default sub comments at the other place had no upvotes, no replies, and were at the bottom of the thread never to be seen. On here, nearly every comment i see or post has SOME engagement (like this discussion!). It’s a different game when you have hundreds of millions to billions of users.

You wouldn’t create a meta account. But I know I consume a lot more content than I create. Probably 1% of social media users create 80% of the content. If meta joined, the users that make most fediverse content now will see their engagement drop. There will likely not be a good reason for them to post at all since, in all likelihood, that content has already been posted by a meta user or reposted with more engagement.

Eventually they’ll stop posting because it won’t be fun. At this point almost all content will be meta content, and most activity pub clients will be “alternative meta clients” in practice. If/When meta leaves, the fediverse will likely have a fraction of the content it has now, it’ll be a ghost town and have a long and hard road to recovery.

That’s not to mention the other problems in the article.

When a big corporation like Walmart moves into a neighborhood it kills the small stores because it delivers most of what people want more effectively. Then when Walmart closes shops to consolidate those neighborhoods don’t go back to the way they were, they now have no stores.

There is a lot of content in the fediverse that wouldn’t exist with meta, because meta users would provide better content, more discussion, and more votes would mean more granularity so better content rises higher. That would stop a lot of the people who post content on activity pub. They would be too late and have too little engagement to be relevant. Those people don’t magically reappear if meta decides that activity pub was just a bad mistake.

I don’t see any large leaps.

If threads uses activity pub, most activity pub users will be meta users using the meta client. Meta will not feel the pressure to conform to the activity pub implementation. They could add features as they want since all their users will use their client. This will cause a sudden incompatibility and the fediverse will have to be the one to fix the problem.

If the fediverse wants to update the protocol to add a feature, we’d have to run it by meta first since they would have to update their client. If they drag their feet it would be hard to force the update knowing it will disconnect the majority of users from the fediverse.

It’s the same situation described in the article with Google and XMPP.

I don’t see any leaps or jumps. This could be how meta kills the fediverse and we’d be walking into it eyes wide open.

This was one of my favorite games in when I was younger, almost 20 years ago now. I had no idea people were keeping it going. It makes me happy to see that it’s still alive.

Sounds like you’re on the right track there. As far as energy goes, you’re right, when things are dissipated, or all the same, you can’t extract anything. You need a differential, like a hot place and a cold one, a high voltage and a low one, a fast object and a slow/stopped one, a high object and a low one. The higher the differential the more you’re going to be able to extract. If it’s too small you might not be able to get any useful work out at all.

If you only had access to the coal furnace you couldn’t make power. The coal furnace is hot and it’s surrounded by room temperature air. The furnace really wants to heat the air around it and the air wants to cool the furnace because nature generally doesn’t like large differentials. So what we do is we force that heat to turn an engine before it can get to the cool ambient air.

It’s like a putting a turbine in the way of a waterfall. The water wants to fall, so we force it to turn an engine before it can get to the ground.

So back to your initial question, an AC is a heat pump. It pumps heat from the cooler inside to the warmer outside. It’s just like if we pumped the the water from the bottom of the waterfall to the top. Yes you can than use that water to generate energy, but you’re the one who pumped it up there in the first place so it’s a bit counterproductive.