cars are a dumb idea in general, with very few applications

moving people around in cities by car is very inefficient and dumb

While I agree that a car in some place like London, New York, or San Francisco is dumb, you've changed your goalposts.

Rather than belabor that point, though, what is your preferred alternative?

You must have live somewhere with excellent public transportation or with a good enough urban center that you're able to do all your work and shopping without traveling any significant distance.

self driving taxi/bus is a very dumb idea that also scares me

Do you feel that way about self-driving cars in general, or just specifically self-driving public transport?

This seems like such a tiny number... surely this is just what's overtly on the books? I can't imagine that they didn't spend at least another factor of 10 in other means.

Ideally, if you create the communities and post questions, wouldn't those that can answer then show up?

I wonder though if at this stage, it would be better to make a more general "What is this?" community, where you can post anything you're hoping to have identified.

Well, yeah, that's entirely logical. Using F/OSS means that no one is paying for the labor of creating that software (in general, yes I'm aware there are paid projects, blah blah whatever). With proprietary software, the labor is always paid (provided they didn't stiff the developers). Maybe cheaply and offshore, but someone got paid to make it.

Really depends on budget and interests.

In general, I'd think getting something historic/vintage that's rare and desirable in that specific field. Something that makes others in that community go "how the hell did you get your hands on one?!"

For me and my interests, that might be tracking down a Nucleon Quest Super Ginrai, Diaclone Lancia Stratos Turbo, or the Petter Solberg version of Alternators Smokescreen. If the budget allows for it, it might be an '05 Lava Orange Mazdaspeed Miata or one of the earlier yellow special editions. It might be tracking down a first edition paperback (hardbacks are lame) of a Phillip K. Dick book.

Use chopsticks.

It's a bit of a double-edged sword. Big companies using the software is one of the most direct ways to user adoption. What would you prefer at work, using the open software of your choice, or using the proprietary system that the CIO gets a kickback for making the company standard?

That's great, and I disagree with you. I find that a downvote button, even if it's not frequently used, increases my engagement with a comment section. I've consistently preferred those sites that have both positive and negative voting. If you don't, that's cool too, but I think you're wrong :)

I'm sure they are, and they're also significantly less convenient. It's no longer a priority of my time and I've lost the inclination to root/rom my phones anymore. If you do, awesome! Hack that bejeezus out of it.

I'm not trying to sell you on using iOS. By my calculus, I find iOS to be the best option in terms of privacy/security vs convenience when it comes to having a cell phone. If your calculus tells you to use a pine phone, or a flip phone, or no phone at all but only use a home-made device built from scratch and only connect over public mesh networks... that's rad as hell and I want to subscribe to your newsletter, but I'm still gonna use my iPhone.

Haven't had much need for it here.

On Reddit, I use it on those things that actively take away from the conversation. Trolling, pushing obviously wrong information, blatant racism/sexism/other-ism.

But, as little as I do use it, I find it supremely important to have. Trolls get downvoted out of the conversation. It's a way to fight brigading. It's the only easy/consistent way to give input as to what content doesn't fit into a particular sub. Downvoting can be problematic, but it's less problematic than those sites that try to be all warm/fuzzy and only allow positive input.

Pretty sure FB can handle losing 10% of part of their business.

Cellular devices are inherently anti-free software due to there not being an open cellular modem. The best you can do is sandbox the modem; with current tech there will always be proprietary code on your phone.

Popsicles. They always make a sticky mess and sensitive teeth makes eating them a literal pain.

Would make sense considering the game is a critique of capitalism. The whole point is to show that ultimately wealth will concentrate in a single player, and that the more money that player has, the faster they accumulate everyone else's.

Biden's gonna need.... about three-fitty.

That's not the part of him that looks like Toad.

Wasn't fluxbox the default WM on Crunchbang? The way they set it up was fantastic. I tried to roll my own version on top of something else (maybe that's when I was playing with Arch?) and I could never get it to work as nicely or smoothly as the #! default.

I deal with this frequently, and don't have it completely figured out, but I do feel I've wrestled it into submission in some areas.

For gear purchases, I had the realization that the cost of not getting the "best" was... well, nothing. Unless I had multiple and could constantly compare them back to back, if I got something that wasn't as good (by whatever metric), I would never know. This most recently reared its head when looking at headphones. I bought something at a price I could afford, that reviewed well enough, and tickled my subjective sensibilities. Are they the absolute best I possibly could have gotten at this price point? I doubt it. Do the gear reviewers like my headphones? They don't dislike them. Do I like my headphones? You gorram right I do.

For conversations it's more of a confidence thing. You just have to trust yourself that what you're going to say may not be the most perfect response ever, but it's also not the worst thing anyone could say, and if it's bad, you know can recover from it. People say dumb things in conversation all the time, the worst that happens is that you sound like one of them momentarily.

For writing, writing about anything is better than not writing. What's the cost of getting into writing one thing and then desperately figuring out that you really want to be writing something else? If anything, it sounds like it puts you exactly where you want to be! Rather than wrestling with multiple ideas and pursuing none, you put some effort into one and then got clarification as to which one was actually worth the effort.

I think all in all, it's just accepting that it's okay to put time/effort/money into what's ultimately the wrong thing as ultimately, nothing is the perfectly right thing.

So, I've always had dogs. Here's the two biggest mistakes that I see with people getting dogs:

1. Treating small dog aggressive behavior as "cute". If you get a small dog, it needs to be corrected for the same behaviors that you would correct in a big dog. It doesn't matter if it's only 10 pounds, it shouldn't be growling, nipping, mounting, or anything like that.

2. Yelling at their dog for barking. Your dog doesn't know what you're saying, it just knows that you're being loud, too, so that means that being loud is the correct behavior right now.

The other thing I'd add is that if you get a dog, a daily walk is a -need-, and no, playtime doesn't replace walking. Ideally you have both walk and play, but if you only have time for one, your dog needs the walk more than the playtime. If your dog has a relatively low exercise requirement, that just means a shorter daily walk, not that you skip days.

Research your breeds and make sure you get something that fits your expected lifestyle. You're making a commitment to a living creature with it's own needs and wants, not getting a fun toy to play with until you get bored of it.

It really bugs me that one of the first things he brings up is "zomg, you don't have to compile your own kernel!". I've been dailying Linux for a decade and I used it intermittently for probably a decade prior. I've had to compile my own kernel exactly zero times. I've chosen to once or twice, and that was 15+ years ago.

Has Linus installed Linux at all in the past ten years? It's plug in a USB stick and go. The most technical thing is drive partitioning (which admittedly is pretty technical in the grand scale of $UtterNoob-->$UnixGuru), but that's also not required. There's no chasing down drivers or repos or anything. It's easier than a Windows install, if for no other reason than not having to punch in a 25-digit product key.

Sure you can build Linux from various levels of scratch, but that's an option, and you'd think he'd celebrate it as such.

Harrumph.

Nope and I love it. I used to live on the coast and I hated the never-ending grey and damp that permeated every minute of every day. I do appreciate a good thunderstorm, and I know that we can use all the water we can get, but I'm very happy in my 100+ degree dry heat.

I agree that Facebook being the gatekeepers is bad. However, you're going to need more than just "Facebook bad" to get people to use something else. The bulk of the population just doesn't run the same calculus in regards to privacy vs convenience.

My speculation is that it has to do with people coming over from other link aggregator sites and wanting the same sort of communities they had before. "What do you mean there isn't r/ObscureAnimeComedyReliefCharacters?"

I'd be curious to see what a sort of taxonomic style of subgrouping would do, something like how I think Usenet used to be, but would also allow something to be a member of multiple supergroups. For an off-the-cuff example, if you had a Golf R community, it might be found as //automotive/vag/vw/golf/GolfR, //automotive/performance/HotHatches/GolfR, and //automotive/mechanical/AWD/GolfR. The Golf R group described by all three of those would be the same group. Using this method would means you could subscribe to a group and you would get the content from any increasingly specific subgroups (e.g. .../GolfR/enginetuning, ../GolfR/suspension), which would allow for hyperspecific communities that aren't dead simply because they have a sub-critical mass of posters, but would allow people to subscribe to increasingly specific as communities grew and the amount of irrelevant-to-them posts increased (e.g. you can sub to //automotive today, //automotive/offroad in a month when that's big enough, //automotive/offroad/rockcrawling, when that's big enough...).

I think this style would require some sort of privacy setting for subgroups, as not all posts -should- be visible to their parent groups.

So what are the likely implications and consequences of this for us? Does this mean that Firefox will receive less updates? That it will become more commercialized? That's it's soon dead in the water? No real change?

Bash on my own gear, Powershell at work. I'm still trying to learn how to think in PS's "everything's an object" model.

I grabbed newsboat and have been adding RSS feeds to it. I dig that it's very straightforward, no cruft, text config files, and as a bonus I was able to set it up with Vi-style keybindings.

The only thing it doesn't do, and I don't know that it -could- is the actual aggregation part. I think that would need some form of AI to group similar posts.

Though, I wonder if something could be set up to go through all posts in the feeds that are less than a certain age and do a keyword count. Even if it was just the top X words by count (excluding common words), that would give some sense of what the trending topics are.... hrrmmmmm...

Security is only as good as its weakest point, so I think it's more important to get the completely unaware using something at least as good as Signal than it is to get people who are aware using something better than Signal.

If you say, "hey, use Signal", you've given someone an explicit app to use. It's a binary choice to use it or not. It has a single set of selling points that convince the person or don't.

If you say "hey, use a matrix client", you've saddled them with a decision of not just whether to use Matrix or not, but which Matrix client they should use. You've exponentially added to their decision complexity, as now even if they decide to use Matrix, they also have to figure out how they're going to pick from the available clients, and then make that decision.

That may sound hyperbolic, but watch people in the grocery store sitting there staring at their options. It doesn't really matter if they get Sugar Flakey Corn Puffs or Puffy Corn Sugar Flakes, but they'll sit and stare at the two boxes like they're trying solve world peace.

It almost seems easier to copyright some music, then make sure that music is playing in the background of your videos. Nothing seems to get taken down faster and more effectively than potential copyright strikes for unlicensed use of songs.

VSCodium

Is there anything actively wrong with VSCodium aside from its Microsoft origins?

My understanding is true completely open mobile OS can't happen, at least not with anything that has a cellular antenna. IIRC the F/OSS phones handle this by having anything related to cell access handled via a sandbox, but there's still closed-source software and opaque hardware on the device.

See @Trickypr 's response to mine, it has the source I was referring to.

Thanks! That was exactly it.

I was thinking RSS might be the best way to do it, as then I can can completely control which sources are in the feed. The problem of course is that I completely control which sources are in the feed, lol.

My understanding is comparing app to app, the TikTok app is much more aggressive in it's data collection. This was based on a cursory read of a reddit post by a user who did a deep dive comparing them, however I cannot find the source again, so take it as you will. If I do happen to find the post, I'll link it here.

I think that's part of the point.

Amazon: I think the biggest issue with Amazon is that they sell their own products. It doesn't take a lot of savvy to just watch what's popular and then go use the might of your trillion dollar company to get better production deals and sell a similar product for significantly cheaper. I disagree with the author that AWS should be a separate business; AWS exists because Amazon had to get good at managing servers, and selling access to that hardware and expertise is a natural side-business.

Facebook: Facebook is basically the Outlook of websites; it combines a number of functionalities that are easy enough to replicate individually, but harder to do as one entity. You've got the microblogging aspect, the calendaring/event management aspect, the groups aspect, the single-sign-on aspect, and they all feed off of the hyper-critical mass of users. Everyone uses it because "everyone uses it". I'm not really sure what you could do here other than nationalize it, which only increases the security issues as then there's no wall to prevent the US government from accessing user data.

Apple: I dunno... I have less beef with Apple than I do with the other three on this list. It's not just possible, but -easy- to live your life never using an Apple product or service. They're a luxury brand in the true sense of that term, they've just happened to be wildly successful at it.

Google: Nothing I can say here that hasn't already been said a thousand times. They became a data collection company, and they got really, really good at it. They're especially bad about keeping products alive after they've extracted whatever data they want from them. Break 'em up.