For real. Academics are some of the most prolific pirates I’ve ever met. Usually out of necessity because we don’t pay them reasonably or value their work.

Sweet! I only learned about real-world Sabacc after how much enjoyment I got out of the Kessel Sabacc minigame in Outlaws. Looks like there are a few cantina tables in my area, might check them out.

It does:

…the paper was reviewed, and its appropriateness for the journal’s publishing criteria was rated as “excellent” by the journal’s peer-review process. It was accepted for publication with minor editorial changes. The paper was not actually published, as Vamplew declined to pay the required US$150 article processing charge. This case has led commenters to question the legitimacy of the journal as an authentic scholarly undertaking.

Donziger’s story is heartbreaking and infuriating, and I’m continually disappointed that so few people are familiar with his story and what the courts did to him. It’s one of the clearest examples of judicial corruption and the power and benefits that are afforded to corporations and almost never extended to the people fighting for what’s right and just.

I haven’t used Mojeek, so I can’t speak to that, but the UK has some of the worst privacy protections and mass-surveillance anywhere. They’re also part of the Five Eyes, so I wouldn’t count the fact that they’re UK-based as a point in their favor.

Great question, I’m curious about this too. There was a set of triplets in my high school class, and I’m curious what they’re up to these days. They were pretty awesome, got along with all the different cliques, and were super friendly to everyone. They were fiercely protective of each other and really close.

I just subbed, thanks. This is kind of my fundamental challenge with this platform, though. I don’t want to miss anything on the subjects I’m interested in, so I sub to every instances’ version of the same community. I’m probably doing it wrong, but if I sub to just one small sub-community because I like the mods, or the lack of bots, I feel like I’d be missing a lot of content.

I agree, it’s already happening. The Media Bias Fact Checker bot is another example. Nobody I’ve interacted with wants it, it is functionally useless and inaccurate, and appears to be a cash grab (though we can’t know for sure, because the mods refuse to openly discuss it with users). We live in a capitalist society, so even platforms like Lemmy are subject to its pressures, and require active pushback from users to prevent profits from taking precedence over user satisfaction on larger instances.

Because it does its job terribly. It provides inaccurate information when it would be faster for any one of us to just do a search for ourselves. And when it can’t figure out a source, it still spams the post, instead of just staying out of it. There has been widespread opposition to the bot existing at all, from day one, and the mods seem to have ignored all of us who say the bot sucks and only gets in the way.

It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes, and we don’t need that crap on Lemmy.

I didn’t like the bots on Reddit, and I don’t like the bots on Lemmy.

Yeah, that has more to do with American social issues and lack of government support for the general population. Water engineering is expensive no matter where or when you are, and America is huuuge.

Plumbing was common in the ancient world in the Near East, Middle East, Mediterranean (Greece and Rome), and really wherever there were people. Keep in mind if you ask two different archaeologists, you’ll get two slightly different answers, but it’s pretty common knowledge that running water is not a modern invention.

Some sources (only a quick search, I don’t have access to all the academic journals where you’d find the good stuff):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7004096/

https://ancientengrtech.wisc.edu/greece-overview/water-systems/

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/roman-aqueducts/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_technology

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1506/ <–this one is really cool, the Qanats are still fully functional today

Edit: fixed links

Even when archaeologists don’t have that level of detail, they can still confidently tell you that people don’t really change. If we can imagine something now, they could most likely imagine the same thing a thousand years ago.

For example, you know what’s an incredibly common thing to find on a dig? Dildos. Phallic stuff is everywhere, and when you find a well-polished, life-sized clay dick, it’s pretty clear what it was used for. The Greeks had devices that were essentially computers that could predict celestial movements. Running water and indoor plumbing was relatively common in the ancient world.

We’re so egotistical to think that humans in the past were somehow incapable of thinking, planning, or building at our level. And we convince ourselves that we’re better than them because we have all this fancy stuff No, their brains were just as complex and capable, they just didn’t have access to the same kinds of tools that we do.

how do they know?

I have to know now, this is bugging the hell out of me. Is it an estimate based on daily downloads? Do they get a ping when you connect to the internet, and if so, why would they count that as a boot? If I boot this on an air gapped laptop, there’s no way they could ever know, right? So many questions. Regardless, this seems like a weird thing for them to brag about.