🇨🇦 tunetardis @ tunetardis @lemmy.ca

Posts

8

Comments

628

Joined

2 yr. ago

I guess I'm essentially a flexitarian at this point, though I have never labelled myself as such. I tend to opt for non-meat options but am nowhere near vegan as I only learned after my daughter started dating one. What an incredible minefield it is! You have to sit around and analyze absolutely everything. Like can you believe pepsi is vegan but not diet pepsi?!? But diet coke is. I don't know about coke zero and am frankly afraid to ask…

Ouch that is insane! I did learn from friends that online ticket purchases here do involve a service fee which seems not right for something that's completely automated, but my membership waives it so sometime I buy tickets for them and they pay me back.

Food is not worth it here also. I could buy dinner at a restaurant for less than the price of a couple of popcorn and drinks, and that's what my wife and I wind up doing before a movie. Last time, we went to a restaurant near the cinema and I mentioned to the waitress we were seeing Dune next. She said "Oh, we have a points thing we do towards free tickets! Let me set you up." So now we have even less incentive to do the popcorn thing.

My first ebike was a used tourist rental. As such, it was a bare bones model feature-wise. It only had one button you push to turn on pedal assist and that's it. But the ebike shop owner was kind enough to put a fresh battery on it at no extra charge, and because it was designed for rentals, the thing was built like a tank and looked no worse for wear.

I rode that thing for about 3 years before upgrading to a more tricked out fat tire bike that suits my usage patterns better. Then I gave the old one to my daughter's roommate and it's still getting good use afaik?

For me it often goes one step further. I remember a song or maybe hear it somewhere and think what a great tune! Haven't heard that in forever.

And then what happens is it triggers a flood of other memories from that same time period when it was popular. Then, just as I'm starting to get all wistful, I suddenly recall how I used to hate that song! Like wtf?!?

Plus, the last thing I want to do after a 12-hour shift at a physical job is to bike several miles uphill to get home.

That's a fair point. My job is sedentary and cycling is my primary form of exercise. (That said, I do have an ebike so the workout is not mandatory. Don't tell my dietician that…)

I guess what got me into the cycling option was having a good hard look at the map. I work in an industrial park with a railway running next to it, but that railway was decommissioned years ago, and it turns out that it had been converted into a public trail. Much of the time I was driving to work, I was not even aware of this. But I tried out the trail. Not only does it knock about a mile off the street route, but it replaces slow-rolling trucks with tree tunnels and, because it had been a railway, the grades are gentle and bike-friendly.

I no doubt lucked out there but what I'm trying to say is it's worth checking where bikes can go and cars cannot, as it can be a better experience to take those routes if they exist?

This. I have calculated that the ebike I bought will pay itself off in about 2 years from all that not-driving I'm doing. That's just from fuel/maintenance savings alone. If I factor in that my car is getting quite old and I would probably need to have replaced it by now, it has already paid for itself. (I still need a car for bad weather and certain hauling needs, but I drive it only sporadically these days so it's lasting forever.)

During the pandemic I got a membership to the nearest cinema. It's $10/mo for a screening you can cash in any time, and I guess there are some extra discounts on popcorn and whatever. If you don't use it, it rolls over to the next month. Since on average, a movie I actually want to see on the big screen (most recently Dune 2) comes around every couple of months, it works out because I have 2 tickets by then and my wife and I have a little dinner/movie date.

That's interesting. I will follow up on this. I do occasionally drive to work when the weather or road conditions are atrocious. More so in the winter months. But it's a sporadic thing now and the car is no longer my main mode of transport.

It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. You can restrict your riding to only beautiful days when you're feeling good and it'll still make a difference.

It's good to have a pot with a heavy, well-sealing lid in this case since rice cooks better under a bit of pressure.

• A good quality belt. A cheap belt may last a year or two while a good one lasts decades but doesn't cost 10x as much.
• Any sort of micro-mobility device (bikes, scooters, etc. or even costlier electric versions of these) that replaces a regular commute has good ROI over driving or even public transit (unless you're lucky enough to live in a city where it's free).
• A big sack of rice. It's kind of insane how many meals you can get out of one of those.

Probably Keanu Reaves. We went to the same schools growing up and have similar ethnicity. I don't actually remember him, though I must've passed him in the hall? He's a few years my senior.

Lemmy, in its current state, reminds me of a university online forum. It has a university-ish population of active users who seem reasonably well-educated, and you run into people with disproportionately varied interests and passions compared to the general population.

I joined last summer when I became annoyed by the reddit shenanigans and have never looked back. For me, at least, lemmy already has the critical mass needed to occupy my attention. After the initial reddit wave, the active user count dropped steadily from around 70k to 40k, but seems to be slowly rebounding now as it has climbed back to 50k or so recently.

I think one thing of note is that when people flood into the fediverse for whatever reason, there is a tendency for them to congregate at whatever is perceived as the most central instances. This can be devastating if the servers in question are not up to the task of a sudden influx. I am guilty of this myself. I initially opened an account at kbin.social which was swamped. As I learned how the fediverse works, I eventually settled on lemmy.ca, which is a middling size instance that seems quite stable.

I guess my worry, then, is if lemmy goes viral at some point, it may not be up to the task of dealing with all the people flooding in? Viral trends have an exponential growth pattern, so it only takes a few doublings before you're looking at a million users and beyond. At the moment, scalability worries me more than social concerns in terms of the future of lemmy. But I suppose that may, to some extent, be because it's much harder to predict how the latter will play out with a much larger network, so I am giving it the benefit of the doubt?

One time my dad and I were in Mexico looking for some glue to fix a chair. So walking into town, I said we need to look for Kola Loka—spelled with Ks. My dad said "Nonsense! It would be spelled with Cs." Neither of us had seen how Krazy Glue is marketed in Spanish, but I could've put money on that spelling. I should've, because I was right dammit! And dad, who is a linguist, grudgingly admitted, "All right, I suppose you may have some linguistic talent too." It was the only time I ever won an argument with him over anything having to do with language.

I'm just going to leave this picture of a wampa from the planet Hoth here for no particular reason.

Oh I hate that I'm giving you an upvote!

There is an issue with templated code where the implementation does have to be in the header as well, though that is not the case here. C++20 introduced modules which I guess were meant to sort out this mess, but it has been a rocky road getting them to be supported by compilers.

Looks like we've got a Java programmer here taking C++ for a spin.

It's a double whammy for utilities. It would be a massive challenge just to transition existing production away from fossil fuels, but they need also anticipate a giant surge in demand as entire sectors of the economy electrify.

And that is only tackling the production side. They also need to invest heavily in grid storage and upgrading the grid itself both to handle the greater power demand and adapt to more intermittent power sources. The stopgap measure here is fall back on peaker plants, but these are some of the heaviest emitters around, as their flexibility comes at the cost of efficiency relative to base load generators.

I guess it all comes down to time. Given enough time, all of this infrastructure could be put in place. Had we taken climate change seriously decades ago when scientists first raised the alarm, we would be in better shape today, but it's water under the bridge at this point. As it stands, we need to find ways to buy time, and that will likely entail some sacrifice to the status quo of our consumer culture. But people seem so dug-in to not accept any change or adaptation to circumstances. It's worrisome.

Accounts, yes. Posts, not necessarily. I joined during the great Reddexodus, when the influx caused several instances to go down temporarily. What I recall happening was the communities that were mirrored to other instances still had accessible posts and comments, but they were essentially frozen? Like you couldn't contribute any more to them without the host instance coming back online.

I think the way it works is if you are the first to subscribe to a community from a non-local instance, its content gets synced to yours, which adds some resilience in case that the remote instance goes down. At least that's my impression of how it works.