riskable

UK: "Nothing works over here."

That would be nice... If companies still promoted people beyond the levels of, "beginner peon" to "senior peon."

The Asstralians: Everything about them is upside down.

That's actually an unholey workaround! o contains 100% more hole than -.

There is none. It's bismuth as usual.

A 3D printed PLA object would degrade faster than an injection molded one. Because the layer lines provide much, much more surface area for bacterial infiltration.

I read a study about that specific thing once but I searched just now and can't find it (from my phone). I'll search again when I'm back at my PC later so I can give you a link but... That makes sense, right?

For plastics like PET and ABS microbial breakdown doesn't occur but with PLA and PHA it does. The more surface area, the faster it can be broken down.

Whereas with ABS and PET, the more surface area, the faster it will turn into long-lasting microplastics.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump said, adding that such a requirement would mean “we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials”.

Yes! Fucking exactly. That's right. That's why everyone since forever has been saying that illegal immigration is an untenable problem!

Except this guy... Who doesn't believe in civil rights or due process.

PLA microplastics take three years. That 80-years figure you've got in your brain is for PET:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166445X25001547#%3A%7E%3Atext=In+fact%2C+slower+degradation+rates%2C%28European+Bioplastics%2C+2023%29.

(BTW: That study is brand new! From a few days ago.)

See also: https://cen.acs.org/materials/polymers/biodegradable-polymers-make-microplastics/102/i37#%3A%7E%3Atext=In+the+open+environment%2C+PLA%2Cover+another+several+years+%28Sci.

There's some confusion about how PLA breaks down because there's remnants after the 3-5 years where it's not detectable anymore. Those remnants are not microplastics at that point. They're just the base components (e.g. lactic acid) that can last a little bit longer.

Some colorants can last a really long time but I haven't looked into those as much as I have plastics.

BTW: The "sparkly bits" in "silk" filament is just mica powder (iron). It looks like it might be harmful but it's not.

Not only that but most 3D printing is done with PLA which doesn't generate meaningful microplastics. I mean, it does but they only last a short time out in the wild. A study funded by the state of California found that PLA will last up to three years of left out in the environment (e.g. not in a trash dump).

Three years is nothing. Also consider that many animals can eat and digest PLA. Furthermore, if it ends up in your body it will eventually be broken down.

The real microplastics problem comes from tires and plastics like ABS that are used in f'ing everything. ABS microplastics last like 400 years or something like that.

Other plastics last even longer but the studies I've looked at all suggest the same thing: Tires and ABS.

Even PET water bottles aren't as bad because they only last 80-100 years (until *fully" broken down). That sounds like a long time but also consider that PET fibers are mostly inert and don't seem to absorb and re-release nasty things like ABS.

Don't get me wrong: PET microplastics (which mostly consist of tiny fibers from textiles—not from bottles) are 100% a problem. They're just a fraction of the problem of everything else.

For reference, the biggest problem with PET fibers is that they float and can be carried by the wind. That means they tend to settle on top of soil which causes it to absorb more heat and retain less moisture... Requiring more watering. Whereas the butawhateverthefucktoxicshit that tires break down into can result in soil that's harmful to life (in general). Enough of it and nothing will grow at all.

That's why you rarely see weeds sprouting up from kids playgrounds that were filled with chopped up car tires. Well, that and the fact that they can get really hot.

In 25 years, 17% of Bangladesh will be under water. All these people are about to get real close to each other.

Ok let's get this out of the way: Copying is not the same as stealing. Not in law or ethics.

So let me reword what you wrote to better represent what you're saying:

So you think the people at fault are NOT the billion dollar corporations that copied much of humanity's creative works into their servers to create and sell a for-profit product?

Let me ask you this: What is the actual consequence of copying something on to a computer? Loading it into RAM. Performing analysis on it. Doing whatever with that data, internally—without ever sharing it or creating a product or anything like that.

Imagine that AI doesn't exist yet and some billion dollar company deems it worth their time to archive the entire Internet's worth of copyrighted content. They don't distribute. They don't share it. They don't even tell anyone.

What is the actual human consequence of that? There's is none. No one was deprived of anything. They have misrepresented no one. They have not created anything at all. No one is reading it. No one is consuming it. It's just sitting there—on a billion dollar corporation's servers.

Now let's change the scenario slightly: Suddenly Mega Corp decides to use it—internally. To analyse how all this content is related. They look at all the links and references within it in order to figure out how "cheese" related any given bit of content is. They announce the cheese search engine.

Is that a problem? They're literally storing and indexing all the world's content on their servers! They didn't license it! They didn't ask for permission!

What I'm saying—my argument in it's purest form—is that it's the use of the content that matters. How is it used? Is the use depriving someone of something? Do people lose access to cheese because of the existence of the cheese search engine?

Now let's take it further: Mega Corp decides to transform the cheese data and allow people to request semi-random cheese recipes. Some of these recipes are nearly identical to patented and trademarked cheese products!

Do cheese makers now have a legal right to sue? Do they have an ethical argument to make?

Maybe.

What I'm saying is that merely collecting the data and screwing around with it is irrelevant. It's not until that data is distributed somehow that matters. Because until that point it's just bits on a machine somewhere—not impacting anything.

But instead the random people who use it?

Yes! If I make oil paintings for a living and someone asks me to copy someone's copyrighted work it's on me to make sure I don't do that. Now think about it as a copier: Someone walks up to a Xerox machine and copies a book. Do we sue Xerox for providing that capability?

That's what's at stake here: Do we treat the AI like the artist or do we treat it like the Xerox machine?

That is a six-pin flex PCB connector. Nothing more. Nothing less.

What did it connect? Dunno. It could connect any number of things that needed six pins for communication.

My wild guess: A floppy drive motor.