MrFlamey @ MrFlamey @lemmy.world

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105

Joined

2 yr. ago

Not sure about Google Assistant, as I don't use it, but for driving navigation I love the British female voice. She sounds ditzy when saying "turn left", and like some kind of SM mistress when she says "turn right". I love it. Despite this, I would swap her for a thick Scottish male accent in a heartbeat.

Honestly I try to only use the subscription feed because the home feed is addictive. I installed the unhook addon to block as many recommendations and other algorithmic things as possible, and try to just search when I want to find a particular thing.

However, sometimes I find myself running out of ideas and just disabling unhook and watching a few things from the home feed before reenabling it and going back to subscriptions only. I think if I also disabled ublock, youtube would be infinitely less addictive, since it would shove ads in my face constantly, and I'd soon get fed up.

So he bought the users and is hoping some of them stay while he rebrands? Or he genuinely just wants to destroy Twitter? I just have no idea what this man is doing, but perhaps he'll prove us all wrong and show that he really is a genius in a five years?

Yeah, I didn't delete my account, but I've logged out so I can't comment and close it if a login to read box appears. Like you, I'll probably be just as addicted to Lemmy soon enough.

I think listening to audio only (no video wasting bandwidth) with the screen off and Youtube Music seem like actually valuable things to have if you do a lot of driving. I don't listen to Spotify at home, but when I was driving a lot I sure did.

I'd pay money to break my Youtube addiction completely to be honest. There is good content, but I don't like the way it's served. Not just ads, but recommendations. I don't get addicted to Netflix in the same way, though I do sometimes binge watch shows. Certainly wouldn't pay for Youtube, and if they made it impossible to watch for free without ads by preventing ad blockers working I think I'd rather just quit entirely and pay for Nebula, since it focuses on the kind of content I value more and don't get as addicted to watching.

Someone I used to work with went through a period where they were overworked and stressed out, but at the same time having some really bad thoughts about free will being an illusion. The theory was something like this:

Everything since the big bang is governed by physics, and Earth and all life on Earth is the result of particles coming together and interacting in interesting ways over billions of years. If this is true, everything we do is a foregone conclusion, and you could simulate and predict anything if you had a computer able to simulate the universe.

It sounds kind of plausible to be honest, but there is just no point in entertaining it. If we don't have free will, we'll never know for sure and cannot change it. If it feels like we have free will does it matter? Anyway, my colleague quit a short while later and went on to do other things and seemed much happier, so I guess it was just a weird period in his life.

Last Autumn I went on a month long road and hiking trip around the Tohoku region of Japan to climb as all of the 100 famous peaks of Japan in the area. I drove in a kei van from Kyoto to Tohoku and then went around all the mountains on my list, so I did an absolute fuck ton of driving (4400km total) and over 200km of hiking in just under a month.

While these are generally not challenging hikes, I didn't really want to mess around camping, since I don't have a lot of camping experience, and although I could stay in a mountain hut, I'd still need to take a setup for sleeping and extra food, so I just tried to make everything a day hike.

Mostly this was fine, but one of the last hikes I did was Mt. Iide, which was the longest of all the hikes, with about 22km of mountain trail and total ascent of around 2000m (not height, just sections where I was hiking up a hill).

I set off at 6am, slightly later than planned, but it wasn't a big problem, and the first hour and a half was absolutely fine. The weather was cloudy with some light drizzle, but I was feeling good, and had reached a narrow rocky ridge after emerging from the forest. I scrambled up a few rocky sections of path, and was quite enjoying it, but at one point it felt a bit steep and as I pushed myself up what I thought was the trail I realised that I must have made a mistake as it had basically turned into light rock climbing, and the rocks didn't seem especially firm either. I looked down and realised that if I fell I would fall quite a long way down into a valley, because the ledge I clambered up from was too narrow to stop me. I didn't really want to risk backing down onto it either as I was nearly at the top of the short climb, so with some effort I managed to push myself up and back onto the next part of the trail and to relative safety.

I looked around and realised there was another route up, with a chain to climb, and that I'd just done something really stupid because I wasn't paying attention. The drizzle had also wet the rocks, and everything felt super sketchy, but I continued up the trail crouched low to the ground in a state of fear, and eventually reached a hut and took a short break.

Then I took a wrong turn, walking for almost 40 minutes in the wrong direction. I jogged back to the hut and continued the hike along another ridge with a couple more short rocky sections, eventually managing to reach the summit, but I was absolutely drained of energy and it was also covered in snow, so wasn't especially pleasant to be there, but I had to slow down and take frequent breaks to refuel.

On the way back I was dreading heading back down the first rocky section, and was in a rush to get there before dark, but when I got there and saw it from above without the drizzle it didn't really phase me at all and I walked down it in maybe 15 minutes. I managed to get back to the van by around 4pm, so I didn't have to use my headlight at all, let alone on the rocks. Thanks to my route-finding error, I ended up walking 26km :/

This trip really woke me up to the dangers of hiking, and the need to plan carefully. I'd literally been driving to each mountain, usually sleeping in the van at the trailhead and hiking up the next day, but this time was almost too much for me, and I was lucky I didn't have even a minor accident and that I had packed just enough food. I know there are far more dangerous trails, both in Japan, and especially in other countries where mountains are larger, more remote and the likelihood of bumping into dangerous fauna is higher, but I'm glad I learned this lesson in Tohoku, and not on any of the properly terrifying hiking trails in the Northern Japan Alps.

Ain't nobody telling blackberries where they can and can't grow. The honey badger of berries. The most based berry.

I kinda wish raspberries were as hardy, since they are the most delicious of berries.

Uhm, so what extra value to subscribers did they add recently? Is it just a case of Google's costs going up or simply their need to make more profit to delight shareholders?

This may be true, but I've seen basically zero ads in Vivaldi with uBlock Origin installed. However, perhaps there are issues I'm just not noticing, or problems caused by having uBlock active that don't occur in Firefox.

I saw a few nasty pics of a woman defaecating that were just slipped into random trending posts a couple of days ago, but it seems to have calmed down now. No idea how that kind of thing is going to be prevented in the future, but hopefully there will be something.

One thing that annoyed me a bit was that Lemmy Connect was not blurring the images, even though they had been heavily downvoted and I had blur NSFW enabled. I guess it only blurs things tagged, not things that have been downvoted, and it might be worth adding the option to blur images on -n downvotes as an option to enable users to crowd source censor images.

I use Vivaldi on desktop, but due to having problems with Firefox for Android I switched to Kiwi on mobile as it has basically full extension support. It's Chromium, and I'm not sure if it's maintained well or what, but I haven't had any problems with it, whereas Firefox would just stop loading pages after a bit and it didn't get fixed for a year or so and I got fed up.

Does it matter if you use a Chromium browser that isn't Chrome itself? I know Google has a large influence in Chromium development, but presumably they can't just stick tracking in other Chromium based browsers, can they? I just really like Vivaldi.

That's a really great point. I'm hoping that in the future there will be something like community federation on top of server federation, so that friendly communities that are very similar (not just in name) can be joined together to share content and users and blacklist unfriendly communities. Even if this was something that was done on the user/app side, rather than a real Lemmy feature it would make it easier to follow multiple similar communities, and it would be less of an issue to have the same community existing on multiple servers.

I think he's already been in trouble with the SEC over alleged Tesla stock manipulation (using Twitter to claim he was taking the company private at 420 a share or something), so maybe it could have become a real mess, so he decided to just go ahead with the deal.

He also manipulated crypto with his oversized influence through Twitter, though afaik the SEC can't do shit about that as crypto was (and still is) basically unregulated.

It's much harder to fuck up so quickly, since a Tesla is not a live service, so there's not a lot that will change about the already sold cars.

I guess if Musk decides to save money by firing engineers and reducing QA on the car software, and insists on pushing really buggy software then it could get gnarly I guess, but I don't think he's that stupid, and I don't think all these Twitter moves are entirely about trying to make a profit; It's so bad I think there is a level of malevolence involved.

Religions are unlikely to change substantially, I imagine they'll just find some way to explain the existence of aliens that fits their existing scriptures and world view.

There will be new religions that pop up as a result though, for sure.

I think it's that in the US, UK and many other countries, cycling is just not convenient for normal people as a form of everyday travel due to the way many cities are designed, resulting in the type of cyclists you see generally being younger, braver people commuting, and those who cycle as a hobby or for fitness. In countries where cycling is a convenient means of transport, such as the Netherlands and parts of Asia, there is a much wider variety of people on bikes, including mothers with children, old men riding with their pet dog in the basket, and even motorists will probably spend some time on a bicycle, as it might be a convenient way to get around their neighbourhood or pick up some groceries.

I think that this makes it a lot easier to create a stereotype of cyclists in places like the UK, where the mainstream rightwing press writes regular hit pieces of cyclists, as the image of "the cyclist" is easier to imagine as "the other" for a larger portion of the population.

The vision seems like an exclusive tunnel for Tesla owners rather than a viable form of transport. Actually, I'm not really sure what it is anymore, since there appeared to be a weird one that was basically a Tesla tunnel, and another that had maglev capsules or something. Not sure either seems like the best idea ever, but I doubt decent trains will ever exist in the US, so perhaps it's better than nothing.