Microblog Memes

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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
Be nice.
No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

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Sometimes we create our own problems. (lemmy.world)

submitted 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (3 children)

You can read the Technology Review article here discussing why this is problematic beyond a JPEG-artifacted screenshot of a snappy quip from a furry porn Twitter account that may or may not have read the article beyond the caption. We need solar power plants to reach net zero emissions, but even despite their decreasing costs and subsidies offered for them, developers are increasingly declining to build them because solar is so oversaturated at peak hours that it becomes worthless or less than worthless. The amount of energy pumped into the grid and the amount being used need to match to keep the grid at a stable ~60 Hz (or equivalent where you live, e.g. 50 Hz for the PAL region), so at some point you need to literally pay people money to take the electricity you're producing to keep the grid stable or to somehow dump the energy before it makes its way onto the grid.

One of the major ways this problem is being offset is via storage so that the electricity can be distributed at a profit during off-peak production hours. Even if the government were to nationalize energy production and build their own solar farms (god, please), they would still run up against this same problem where it becomes unviable to keep building farms without the storage to accommodate them. At that point it becomes a problem not of profit but of "how much fossil fuel generation can we reduce per unit of currency spent?" and "are these farms redundant to each other?".

This is framed through a capitalist lens, but in reality, it's a pressing issue for solar production even if capitalism is removed from the picture entirely. At some point, solar production has to be in large part decoupled from solar distribution, or solar distribution becomes far too saturated in the middle of the day making putting resources toward its production nearly unviable.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

In other words… Maybe 29 word Twitter captions aren’t a great way to discuss issues?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

Nah, I see nothing wrong with an information diet composed of random people with no background sharing their pet conspiracy with 5 million people on TikTok that they learned from three minutes with ChatGPT, furry porn accounts clapping back on Twitter to an out-of-context 29-word quote from an MIT Technology Review article (reshared so many dozens of times that the quality has noticeably degraded), or a picture generated in a Russian disinformation farm showing a muscular Donald Trump rescuing crying orphans from drowning in Hurricane Helene while corrupt FEMA agents loot their houses.

God fucking help us.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

But on the plus side,

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

On the plus side I guess: accessing good, robust information has literally never been easier as long as you're media-literate enough not to fall into the landfill of trash information that you're walking over.

During its start in the 2000s and early 2010s, Wikipedia was like a shadow of what it is today. As an example, take a look at the article for the element oxygen in 2006 (ignore the broken templates) and the article today. Its editors were just as smart, well-meaning, and hard-working, but guidelines and a deeply entrenched culture hadn't emerged around making sure things are as verifiable, reliable, independent, unbiased, inclusive, and comprehensive and as possible. It's kind of insane how much you can find there now as a starting point for further research. Wikipedia also forced the web-ification of Britannica, meaning even if you deeply distrust Wikipedia for some reason, you no longer need to pay hundreds to have an encyclopedia in your home.
Additionally, I imagine there are serious, experienced editors who are using LLMs to great effect as essentially a search engine on steroids to find obscure information, thereby speeding up their work (and they have the media literacy from years or decades of editing Wikipedia to wield this responsibly). Those who use it irresponsibly seem to be very quickly found out, although because I can't prove a negative, I can't say how much slop has slipped through the cracks.
Extremely niche hobbies and specialties have e.g. YouTube channels, subreddits/communities, etc. dedicated just to them providing a fantastic wealth of knowledge. Right now, I can go watch Gutsick Gibbon on YouTube to catch up on various findings in primatology from a PhD candidate on the verge of becoming a doctor. I can watch Gamers Nexus for highly comprehensive breakdowns of tech products. Realistically, I can self-teach in ways I never could have 20 years ago as long as I'm responsible.
Piracy has arguably never been easier to gain access to paywalled research papers, books, etc. There's a movement in academia to make research open-access.
Software is moving more and more toward open-source. This gives entrenched, capitalist power structures increasingly limited control over people and opens up this knowledge to everybody.

That all being said, things are really dire because so many people really lack the basic media literacy skills to utilize these tools and avoid the ocean of shit around them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

America: …Nah, this is fine. In fact, let’s elect the platforms’ owner-influencers. scrolls happily

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

I've known about the issue with a lack of ways to store the energy produced for about 5 years now, does it seem like we're making any steps in it recently? Also how does it work in a "green" fashion to produce all of the batteries necessary for that sorts of energy storage, I feel like that's going to be one of the next discussions about how "pure" this method is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago

I do like how this Twitter account, in the rush to blame capitalism, overlooked the fact that the sun rises and sets every day.