fhqwgads @ fhqwgads @possumpat.io

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2 yr. ago

Is being a meme template a good thing?

Maybe I'm behind on my terms but does this count as a dark pattern?

It was my understanding that dark patterns are a thing designed to use a service in a way that they wouldn't normally intend to, like renew a subscription or leave privacy options to the benefit of the company instead of the user.

This just seems like a scam, or at best highly deceptive advertising? Like, for it to be a dark pattern it would have to actually be able to send you to some android update system, but it almost certainly isn't ever going to do that.

We should defederate with any server that has less than 7 degrees of separation with Meta. We can call it the Kevin Bacon rule.

As someone who just had to basically retire their surface pro 3, I've always felt like they were great devices that really didn't work well for tech journalists and so they got kind of unfairly punished for doing all the things they were doing for good reasons.

A great example was the power connector - they always got dinged for not having a "standard" one like USB-C, but somehow magsafe returning was amazing, when the surface pro one was already magnetic and it worked incredibly well with the dock.

The keyboards always got dinged since you couldn't type up the Apple keynote from the audience but in reality no one I know has ever had a problem with "having" to use it on a table. The pen always got dismissed with some scribbles, going, "it's ok but I'm not an artist" but never actually checking with an artist, and every year it gets "it looks the same but has a new processor" when realistically what the hell are they supposed to change? When they were thick and powerful everyone complained about the thickness, and when they were thin and slower everyone complained about the performance.

Like, there are actual issues - the repairability is garbage (apparently the newer ones are better?) , they've had weird hardware issues, the BIOS is useless, and the keyboard really should be included in some way, but everyone I know that has one really likes theirs.

To be fair e-axles are actually a thing. You can mount the electric motor where an engine would be and use largely the same components as a traditional car to get the motion to the wheels. Instead e-axles basically wrap all the motion components around the axle. Motor trend had an article about it a while ago.

www.motortrend.com/news/e-axle-vs-central-drive-motor-layout-commercial-evs

I would love to see chargers more incentivized at workplaces. As solar becomes more common charging during the day is going to make more sense than night. There are already ways to track charging costs and bill them out or just consider it a job perk. Most people don't need to charge 300 miles a day so even if every single employee drives an EV you probably only need to install enough chargers for somewhere like ¼ of the cars on site. Yes some people need to drive for work, but there are a lot of cars that sit all day and could be running on solar instead of charging off something else at night instead.

I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don't know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there's maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you'll see most posts have less than ten comments.

Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it's kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I'm guessing I'm not alone.

The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they've essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.

In large part I think it's because Lemmy's discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it's kind of on purpose it's still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.

One of Lemmy's key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there's really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.

On a more personal note, I feel like I'm vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it's dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I'm just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line "butter spread over too much bread" it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I've had a few so I'm rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.

Epoxy coated rebar is already a thing, so insulated rebar shouldn't be that big of a deal - if epoxy isn't enough already.

Sorry if I came out like I'm trying to discredit the idea, rather I was just trying to put more information out there - the linked article is fairly light on details.

Like, if your primary business is solar, and as a profitable side project you also produce food, what's the actual issue there?

There isn't one. But it's somewhat concerning that it was more viable for the owner to become a power plant than to run their farm as a farm.

It's a dodge since the farm mentioned is historic farmland. They aren't allowed to stop farming and just put up solar.

When Kominek approached Boulder County regulators about putting up solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland.

In Kominek's case, he literally bet the farm in order to finance the roughly $2 million solar arrays.

"We had to put up our farm as collateral as well as the solar array as collateral to the bank," he says. "If this doesn't work, we lose the farm."

From: Original NPR story

If anything it seems like a clever way around zoning. Reading between the lines it seems they view the crops as kind of a bonus, not half the point like the original article makes it seem.

This seems to largely be a "retelling" of an original story from NPR from 2021. The original has significantly more information from actually interviewing the owner of the project.

The original story from NPR says that they're able to drive their tractor between the panels. It's interesting that the project could essentially be described as an end run around a historic designation though. They put 1.2 MW of solar up, and from reading between the lines it seems that's how they're making money, the farming seems to be much more of a side thing that they're required to do for historic reasons.

Do you have any more information on this? A quick search largely just shows results about how firefighters need to be careful since the panels can look bad but still be producing voltage and are a shock hazard.

Not an expert, but my gut reaction is not really. The panels themselves are largely glass, aluminum and silicon, with fairly small amounts of doping agents. There are electronics but since they're outside they're largely encased in something, wiring which would be plastic and copper or possibly aluminum, and then the structure itself which is going to be steel and concrete.

Solar panels are significantly more sturdy than one would think given they are essentially a giant piece of glass. They're usually rated to 12mm hail or more, which would normally absolutely devastate a crop. They don't really go bad either they just become less efficient over time. There's no moving parts to wear, no liquids, and in some designs very little in the way of electronics to go bad.

Essentially, I wouldn't be surprised if there would be more harmful contamination from a diesel tractor driving around in the field or from a nearby coal power plant than from any kind of solar array as long as it didn't have like, lead legs or something.

That being said, these kind of projects have been shown a lot but they're unlikely to be used in most large scale farming - they usually interfere with any machines used to plant or harvest, and are only really well suited to a few crops. Parking lots are a much easier target for this type of solar project.

Tldw: it's boring and grindy. Honestly the video isn't great.

Since I played it when it was free from epic too:

Its a game whose tediousness outstrips its interesting ideas way too quickly. There's a loop that starts blank that the hero goes around, and the player builds the loop up over the course of a "mission" by placing things like mountains and plains and swamps. Some of these tiles spawn monsters, some help the hero, and some do both. It's the most interesting thing in the game and also the most underdeveloped. Eventually after placing enough tiles a boss spawns and your "mission" is over and the hero goes back to camp. Technically you can keep going through loops but there's really no point.

Camp is made up of buildings that you build out of resources collected during the loop and serves as a sort of meta progression for the game. You build things and get new cards, classes, equipment and whatnot. They're made of tiles but much larger and less visually distinct than the loop tiles - which is super annoying because much like the loop tiles layout is important but unlike the loop that you will place a million times, you only get one camp, so any mistakes are forever. Camp Tiles are built from resources gathered doing loops, so they feed into each other in a kind of rougelite way.

The main problem with the game is that the systems are interesting but they have so much tedious stuff attached that the entire experience is bogged down. Take for instance equipment: the game gives you a stream of equipment that functionally can be different, it might buff attack speed, defense, all kinds of things. But the game gives you like hundreds of pieces of equipment per loop, and it's all random so you wind up babysitting the equipment section of the screen all the time so that the hero doesn't become underpowered and die, but you also can't try for a "build" because any equipment you don't use is slowly deleted. If you want attack speed the only thing you can do is pray to rngsus that it pops up consistently (spoiler, it won't). Or the camp itself - eventually you unlock furniture for each house, there are a million different ones, and they're all things like +1%hp Regen.

But by far the grind gets the most real when you start looking at how many resources you need. Certain tiles grant certain resources that are given during the loop, which is a really good way to incentive players to not get stuck in a rut when building the loop - but the math is way off, and when failing to defeat the boss means that you lose 70% of anything gathered it just adds insult to injury. It's supposed to be a push your luck thing, but you're only allowed to leave once a loop and loops can be fairly long and .... well like everything else in this game - random.

It kinda feels like I'm just crapping on the game, but I actually think under the tedium there's an interesting game here. The first time you find a tile interaction (of which there are far too few) is a little magical, and the plot is kind of interesting even though it's the most overwrought sequel to the neverending story you'll ever read. Like an annoying amount of Devolver games, this kinda feels like it would be a really good mobile game if it was somewhat streamlined.

Is it possible to grab the first few hundred kb and grab a frame?

Otherwise I'd say a play button that indicates it's from catbox and whatever metadata you can grab like file size or length.

Have them printed from a service. A normal deck of cards should run about $30 USD. The paper, laminate, ink and maybe sleeves will probably cost the same or more and will come out with way lower quality especially if this is your first time crafting them.

I've done both and unless you want really quick and dirty prototype cards or something that is super handmade that you drew on yourself instead of designed on a computer, the ones from a printing service win hands down.

From what I've seen this has been turned upside down by... well essentially automation, just not the kind everyone is afraid of.

Between better techniques and tools, a lot of construction is significantly faster than it used to be, to the point that a job that's smaller has enough... I guess "opportunity" cost that it can be significantly less profitable.

Let's say I'm a plumber. In the 80s, I would use copper pipe and have to solder all the connections - even a small job would take a long time - on the order of days. If I do a small house it takes way less time than a big house.

But now instead I would put in long lines of PEX with crimp on connectors. It's like 4x as fast so it should be 4x cheaper right? Except now I have to drive to 4 different jobs to work all day, set up and tear down 4 times, deal with 4 different customers and invoices, etc. OR I can do 1 big house and make essentially the same money since I cut out all the extra work.

Add to that that most people are going to use more expensive finishes on larger houses that I basically just take a percentage of, and they might request something specialty and working on small affordable houses seems like a terrible business plan.

As someone who works with people in residential construction fairly often, this is the answer - and it's why they don't build new "starter" homes anymore. It's very difficult to turn a profit on a single family home that would be considered affordable most places.

Basically, its very little extra effort and expense to build a luxury house compared to an inexpensive one, and your profit margin goes from very thin to decent.

Anecdotally in my area, most residential new construction is going to retirees who have a nest egg and the sale now very expensive house, or couples who sold an inherited house. Occasionally there are people who are remotely working or people building as an investment property, but they're in the minority.

I would hope eventually it would pull the instance icon, which should help. Right now they all just use a generic one for whatever instance it is.