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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)DA
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2 yr. ago

  • You know I really question how many children are gonna grow up in the world basically fatherless, or with an absent father, because there's this idea that the man has to be the one sacking everything they have in order to "put food on the table". Gone for most of the day, devoid of energy when they come home, meat on the chopping block. I wonder how many kids would pick a better house, brand name foods, more toys, over more time spent with their dad.

  • I think this would be awesome if they used the same aspect ratio paper does, 1 to 1.414, so you could open the phone and have a phone in the same aspect ratio but larger. You know, if we're going to keep having nonsense screen aspect ratios where you can't watch any videos without black bars or zoom, you might as well do something fun with it.

    Edit: it's also really stupid that we've seen phones go from being folding, to smartphones, to slowly getting larger and taller over the years, to the point where now people are jonesing for this simply so they can have a more compact phone again. I doubt for most usage you're going to use the inner screen at all, there's pretty limited potential there in what you're watching and doing. Watching a video is probably gonna hit you with omega black bars. Only way I see this making any sense is if you have a classic square to real phone clamshell design, GBA style rather than DS style, but that still doesn't make that much sense to me.

  • the interior screen is almost 4:3, right? you could try watching like. anything made before 1990 whenever, I guess. old ass anime, or something. it's probably not as big in totality as a regular screen, but it's got higher pixel density, and it's portable, so that's neat. I guess another appeal might be that you could use it more easily as a book or a laptop substitute. I also think probably more support will come after it becomes more market accessible, like if samsung actually releases a 400 to 500 dollar model.

  • Relatively split reaction, huh? Interesting.

    So, I think it's kind of naive to believe that we can solve everything tomorrow/very soon with public transportation. It's pretty easy to believe that if you define the rural/urban divide to include a lot of suburbs as urban, which sort of, gets away from the bleakness of the situation a little bit, I think. I think I remember somewhere around a third being split between each form, with a little less being in the suburbs compared to either rural or urban, so it's pretty evident that, even of a portion of the people that work in cities, live just outside cities, those people live with untenable densities for public transportation. I think that's solvable, right, in the long term, by local municipalities, over the course of the next 40-50 years give or take, because infrastructure gets decroded, needs to be replaced, and you can replace it in the meantime just by reworking the standards, something which is generally self-evident to voters as a better solution and creates a positive feedback loop as long as people aren't completely propagandized to.

    The only problem I think you might encounter with this is that it's very hard to get this going in a place that doesn't already support it at all. It's much easier to create public transport if you have somewhere to go, if you're already on the outskirts of a large city. If you make a walkable place in the midst of a collection of townships and municipalities which don't support that, you've become less permeable to cars, and those other municipalities need to provide public transport that goes to your town where they can spend money on your goods and stimulate your local economy, and that doesn't strike me as something likely to happen. This is the structure of lots of shitholes in america already, because the lack of density kind of lends itself towards a fragmented series of municipalities joined together with dogshit social services rather than a singular contiguous government.

    But, then, I also think it's kind of insane the level to which we accept cars and car-centric infrastructure as inevitable even within this context. If you want to slowly increase density, I think there's really a lot of progress that could be made, not specifically by the technology of EVs, but just by making cars smaller. Like, we already see that in europe, japan, whatever. EVs have bigger batteries on average, sure, but you're not going to see people get up in arms about the increased pollution that E-bikes cause, and that's the same fundamental technology of a battery electric vehicle in a different form factor. I feel like the first and most obvious step towards a solution would be decreasing the absolutely extreme size of cars in the US, in any case. You can still be compatible with your 15 mile city outskirts shithole suburb while driving a car that's the size of a geo metro or smaller. It's worked so far for me, anyways. Decreasing size totally strikes me as a bigger win than transitioning to EVs, a higher priority, maybe, though, they're not really mutually exclusive in any way. Smaller lighter cars can be safer in crashes because of the decreased mass, decreased need for stopping power, they can be more gas efficient, possibly much more gas efficient, especially with hybrid technologies. It strikes me as a much simpler solution, one that legitimately requires less production to solve the issue, is more efficient.

  • You could also potentially use them as a solution for more efficiently allocating energy, less by pumping energy back into the grid, and more by running home power from the car battery during peak hours, rather than having to produce too much energy during off hours, having to shut down the power during peak hours or provide limited access, or having to provide power for less people. You can make the power go further, and especially for renewables which have potentially less consistent energy production (the nice part being that peak demand roughly lines up with peak production for solar power, at least, in the summer). But none of that's really an attractive proposition to the american car buyer who wants to travel as far as possible at the drop of a hat, and you have to make car batteries larger and the cars themselves less efficient to compensate for this power draw and power storage that may or may not be happening at any given moment, so it's sort of self-defeating with the american car market.

    Obviously, it isn't really a more equitable or more efficient solution broadly than doing something like pumping water uphill. Or trying to limit demand in the first place by decreasing surface area of homes, by moving towards multiple units in one building, increasing r-values by using better building materials you could shell out for with a larger amount of occupants, yadda yadda urban design garbage. Stuff that generally is antithetical to car-centric infrastructure and thus electric cars. You also potentially run into problems where the as the grid as a whole becomes less relied upon, they make less money, and then the grid starts to fail further in a positive feedback loop. Poor people can't afford rooftop solar and electric cars, because most of them can barely afford rent and aren't really the ones making those decisions anyways.

  • hijacking this post to ask some passing linguist, why is it that any of the invented neopronouns that are socially acceptable and potentially gender neutral, like guy, dude, bro (maybe not that one), how come they're all male-coded? is that cause it makes it go down easier, or do they just become associated with the boys over time?

  • Tell me whether or not they have any good black bean tacos. I'm interested in their bean variety, because I'm not sure to what extent they have the same beanage as over here. I have to expect that they have some level, as otherwise you'd get no bean paste pastries, no miso soup bean stock, yadda yadda. I expect a full report on my desk by may 2024.

  • You’re just a brat. That’s all. Brat. Annoying, ignorant, spoiled brat who cannot appreciate the good stuff they have.

    This seems like a really good way to engage with people and change their minds, and get them to enjoy the things in their life. Definitely not contributing to the problem, or you just taking out whatever issue you have here on other random passersby of the thread. Very cool.

  • I dunno man, I've met some of my peers. The vast majority of them are just normal people, right, living their lives, totally nice, but then some of them are really fucking stupid or mean, and I kind of wonder if this narrative that gen Z will save the world is true at all, or if it's just that same sort of nonsense, that all we'll have to do is wait and things will somehow get better.

  • I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.

  • What's crazy is that there's really no reason why it should be the way that it is, where every chain restaurant has a different individualized app, every mid level business has a website, and every mom and pop restaurant you just have to call on the phone, and every business has their own delivery drivers with all these other apps picking up the slack in between. Doordash takes off so much from the top of the order to make it look more appealing, as a service charge, the restaurants just increase prices, the drivers get paid a pittance, probably so does the support staff if I had to guess, and all of their programmers, who are the only party left that the money would go to, the programmers can't make an app that works for the customers or the drivers. It's like a lose-lose-lose scenario for anyone that's not a soulless finance bro.

    It's crazy, if restaurants are at a point where it's cheaper for them to just have an actual, well paid delivery driver, and just use their own old school apps, websites, and phone lines, rather than paying their fees to a business that could just handle the whole thing for them all in bulk, seeing as the needs from restaurant to restaurant is generally pretty similar. The latter should be the more cost-effective solution, here, it's fucking nuts.

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  • The naivety there isn't so much that soldiers would be incapable of fighting the US citizenry in a large scale war, but more that the framing of the question is false to begin with. It's way easier for soldiers to commit small scale acts of terror than large scale genocides, and it's always easier to commit acts of terror on minorities or the "other" rather than on the gen pop. If we were to see any domestic american guerilla warfare (I find this kind of unlikely compared to the rising amount of lone wolf, stochastic incidents), then it's likely that even the regular population would get fed a ton of bullshit about the opposition being subhuman, or something to that effect. Larger scale versions of how, every time a black guy gets shot by the police, everyone trots out every encounter he's ever had with the police within like 12 hours of the incident. Character assassination, but at a group level, instead of on the individual level.

  • It's not so much a statement of character. I'd get a more valuable statement of character by just looking at his basic political platform. If, say, bernie just had some weird tick where he was super insecure about his height, I would still probably like him about the same.

    The only thing this really is, is funny as shit.