yiliu @ yiliu @informis.land

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2 yr. ago

Like asking 'how can you be a marxist if you don't love every single person?'

There are companies I like and companies I don't like. Capitalism is all about having the choice to pick what I buy and what I use. Shitty companies are free to fail. That's actually a really important part of capitalism.

Thus...proving the point? "If a person thinks I can't handle disagreement, I bet it's because they're some kind of asshole nazi or something! It would be wrong of me to tolerate a difference of opinion with them!"

If the only disagreement you can tolerate is irrelevant minutia, then you aren't actually tolerant. "I'm totally tolerant, as long as our opinions don't differ on race, culture, gender, sexual relations, work, religion, or politics" is pretty weak sauce.

So there's lots of brazen white supremacists in Canada? You must have a ton of similarly-brazen examples then?\

This is noteworthy enough that I've seen it more than once already, on Reddit and here, in a world news community. That suggests that this is pretty frickin rare, which kinda undermines your argument.

As others have said, it doesn't quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren't here.

Also...the user base isn't as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You'd click on some thread about Trump's latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don't work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.

On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of "Ha, fuck Trump!" "Lol, Russia sucks!" "Company X doing this should be against the law!" etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.

Part of it is just that there's not as many users, I think, so there's just not as many posts and thus fewer 'gems'. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.

The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.

He's using the dictator's definition: democracy is when I win, and the larger my margin the more democratic it is!

But what u r saying is under the assumption that laws cannot be changed.

Tend not to change. The parliament will move on and forget about the issue. It's not gonna revisit this decision every 6 months.

This is why the whole medical field in the US still uses fax machines on a regular basis. It was encoded in legislation and then never removed.

USB-C solves all problems that a port can solve.

Tell me you're under 25 without telling me you're under 25. This has been said many times before. USB-C is frankly a bit of a mess (I mean, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2 Gen 2...)

There were ideas about using USB-C for power & networking in houses, replacing most of your wiring with USB cabling. That didn't pan out. You can only use USB-C to drive a 4k display over relatively short distances. It's often flaky. There are things that could be fixed with USB-D or whatever. This adds an obstacle to that goal.

As I said in another reply, a one-way trip to the downtown area of my nearest city is a 1.5-2 hour trip, making for a 3-4 hour round trip commute. This is because the first bus I'd have to catch meanders through the suburb, stopping often, because that's the only way to provide service to giant spread-out suburbs. Either that, or you'd need like 3-4x as many buses cruising through neighbourhoods that were not designed to accommodate buses. And that's not remotely politically viable.

The bus I would catch is usually mostly empty. People don't bother walking anywhere from 5 - 30 minutes to the bus stop to take a 45 minute bus ride to a place that would've been a <15 minute car ride away. And they do have a car, there'd be no realistic way to live in a suburb without one. And most people live in a suburb.

Frankly, typical American suburbs aren't really dense enough to support bus routes. That's why it seems to me that something like this could work. Dynamic bus routes that come closer to your actual home and take you to a trunk route in a reasonable time would be very handy.

I mean you kind of answered your own question. Italian cities (and most European cities) are generally a millenia older than American cities. They were built around foot traffic. They're dense. Stick a few strategic bus routes on major roads, and you're covering a large amount of the population.

I think to understand the problem American cities face, Europeans would have to go for a stroll in a typical American suburb. I live a 30-40 minute walk from the nearest business of any kind (a grocery store). And I'm at the entrance of my neighbourhood; people living further in might easily be an hour's walk away. The nearest office building is a couple hour's walk (on a narrow sidewalk, next to a major road) A one-way commute to downtown (where the jobs are) is 1.5-2 hours for me, meaning 3-4 hours of commuting a day. Again: add 20-30 minutes for many of my fellow residents. Meanwhile, it's a 15 minute drive (without traffic, anyway).

Then you've got the political problem. Since transit is pretty useless now, it's really unpopular. Adding new routes helps only a relatively small number of people who live close to those routes. During the pandemic, many bus routes were shut down, and they haven't come back.

So yeah, you can drive to a Park & Ride. People do that, they get very busy. But in my case, that involves driving roughly half the distance to downtown, at which point...catching transit feels like a token gesture. That kind of situation is pretty typical.

American cities were built around cars.

There are a lot of places in America where public transit in the form of regular bus routes isn't really workable. And like it or not, cities were built without public transit in mind: neighbourhoods are not dense and built around trunk routes. Step one to catch a bus is often "walk 15 minutes to the bus stop". And often there's not even sidewalks. This is...unavoidable, you can't rebuild entire cities or have 5x as many bus routes. It's unfortunate, but it's reality.

If you could get a tech company or startup to provide the mapping/routing software, it would be feasible to make "Uber-style" buses that generated routes on the fly, based on user-requested start & stop locations.

Famously (within logistic circles, anyway) Amazon FCs (basically warehouses, but with minimum capacity) store all their stock randomly. People unload incoming boxes and literally toss them randomly on the shelves wherever they fit--but only after scanning the product and the shelf it's on. Then, when you buy something on Amazon, the inventory system finds a 'picker' (somebody taking things off the shelf) who's near the desired product...they grab it and toss it in a crate on a conveyor belt, which is then routed to a packer, who packs it together with everything else headed to the same customer.

This works much better than traditional warehouses where bulk inventory is all stored together in great big bins. It's one of the big things that makes Amazon so hard to beat on shipping speed & price.

So, analogously: have small buses (not Ubers, with one customer per vehicle) which drive though neighbourhoods, picking up people at or near their house, and dropping them off at Park & Rides, or transit centres, or light-rail stops, as well as destinations. If, at any given time, a bunch of people are headed to a particular spot, make an impromptu route and get 'em there. If things are busy, pay more to cause more buses to run.

This could work. And critically, it could work in American cities today, in a way buses just can't. And it could drive people to public transit, thus increasing demand and revenue, allowing it to expand.

A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They'll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.

The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it...and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.

Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people's lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you'll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.

Part of that is just experience. We've lived though a few 'revolutions' for which the net effect was...arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they're bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn't there before.

And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn't there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.

So like, you browse All, find communities minding their own business making little in-jokes, and pop in to say "hey assholes, I don't appreciate you talking about all this stuff you like talking about! How about you shut up so I don't have to skip past your posts when I'm deliberately skimming everything!"

Seems fair.

"No, wait, it's not what you think! There's a continuous integration system, a commit would've triggered a new build! It might have paged the oncall! Babe! The test suite has been flaky lately!"

Because that's who people showed up to vote for as their representatives, that's how.

I've been using Steam in FlatPak on NixOS for a couple years now.

The only games I've found that didn't work were due to anti-cheat rootkit stuff, which would probably be a bigger deal if I cared about online gaming. And I've had to change the Proton version a couple times, because the beta (default) seems to break a game occasionally. Overall: it's astoundingly good compared to where it was 5+ years ago.

I missed that guy the first time around. Would've made the day feel even more like a fever dream.

So fewer downloads, which is a very different thing.

Well this is a blast from the past. I can't even load the context anymore.

I was engaged in an argument, and staying focused on the argument instead of getting sidetracked by semantics. But anyway, you claimed "it's not ad hominem, he said you were wrong therefore you are stupid!" That rests on the assumption that I was wrong, so I was assuming that was your assertion.

I think. This was, after all, months ago, and apparently the account I was arguing with got deleted or something?

For real? You're really suggesting that anybody who says they're for free speech is actually a fascist pedophile?

First, why is every post on this forum -1? Somebody must be holding a grudge.

Second: it doesn't matter. ECC just prevents bit flips in RAM, once data leaves a system it's irrelevant whether it had ECC or not.

I've been running servers of various kinds for decades. There is a difference between running servers on hardware with ECC vs none, but it's not a big deal. Unless you're running, like, banking software or something where accuracy or uptime is critical...I wouldn't sweat it. You may just have to reboot cuz of a kernel panic once or twice a year.