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7 days agoA ferry or other regular short-run vessel can be electrified too. The tour boats at Niagara falls switched to pure-electric a few years back, and they’re plugged in to recharge during onboarding and off boarding.
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Cake day: September 15th, 2024
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If a boat travelled as fast as a plane the extra resistance would likely make it less efficient. And the whole shape would be designed to be most efficient at speed, so you couldn’t carry that much in the first place.
For an aircraft to travel as slow as a ship it would also need to be radically redesigned, and would likely be a lighter-than-air design since low speed makes reliable lift hard.
Zepplins, derigibles, blimps, and balloons are fairly efficient per surface mile. (Less so depending on how they achieve buoyancy…)
Did you ever manage to get steam to let you import a gog game and install mods from steam’s modding community?
Stellaris mods are essentially only on steam, and my “buy from GOG whenever possible” rule means I have a gog copy instead of a steam one. And non-steam downloading of steam mods is a PITA.
That entirely depends on specifics.
Corporate America already is a soul-crushing land of terrible art, bad writing, and shoddy code. The artists, writers, and programmers there will have a mix of reduced job satisfaction and more competition for creative roles but a reduced portion of their workload doing the most creatively boring parts of the job. So, to the extent that “in-house creative” remains, it will more or less be the same blah it is today.
The big risk is the destructive cycle of LLMs and “GenAI” in specifically creative enterprises. If Disney replaced all their creatives with AI slop, and the AI continues its trend of unimpressive mediocrity, Disney as a creative corporation might shut down or even go out of business.
What’s worse about the above is that if it’s replicated on a large enough scale for a long enough time, we might wind up having no creatives at all and the whole skill set may atrophy away from our civilization.
On the other hand, if GenAI winds up substantially increasing the proportion of unemployed citizens, a UBI might be implemented and all those creatives who chased soul-crushing work just so they wouldn’t starve would do it for the pure joy of creation.
(All of which, of course, assumes that the runaway power demands of GenAI don’t destroy the biosphere…)
True enough. Except that literally any platform you should be writing user-facing code in has a modern class for managing dates in a calendar-agnostic way.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Temporal
(Said as someone whoss day job includes supporting a literal dead platform because the attempts to replace the app keep getting kicked down the road. Although thankfully our users are all internal and in the same timezone so we can just dictate what calendar they use.)
there’s a ton of applications using strings, separate fields for year, month, day; etc, etc.
Can I answer your prior question with “such software was badly designed, doesn’t follow any best practice from the last 30 years, and is a clear example of technical debt”?
https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca
Virtually no software program internally cares about calendar specifics. Most computers are happy just counting seconds since the start of 1970 (Unix epoch) with some weirdos counting days since 1900 (excel) or some other arbitrary date (SQL server goes down to 1753, when the current Gregorian calendar was adopted.)
the big issue isn’t so much the software cost as the fight over finance. Does your $1000 a month rent go “down” to only $923 a month (same $12,000 per year) or does it “stay” at $1000 and your landlord enjoys the increased revenue?
(Agreed on dates. Either ISO dates or use some damn names for your months! Mar 19 2026 and 19 Mar 2026 are both obvious at a glance if for some reason 2026 3 19 doesn’t work.)
BlueSky is a top-down approach to do the same thing that the Lemmy/Mastodon fediverse is trying to do bottom-up. They are approximately as untrustworthy as the devs and admins of your local fediverse server.
You absolutely should not trust any third party with private data that would destroy your life if revealed. Lemmy and BlueSky are both way better than Meta or Google, but they’ll all comply with government subpoenas and by design most of the data entered on these apps is public anyway.
As to funding, BlueSky says that they’re a “public benefit company” with some VC and cryoto-bro funding, a small registrar business, and some aspirational ideas about selling add-ons to support BSky as an ongoing concern.
I recall hearing about a merchandise sale they had for a bit that dwarfed their registrar revenue, but I think that was time-limited.
The largest “alt-sky”, blacksky, asks for donations if you use their services and (Iirc) aren’t a person of color.
101·26 days agoWage theft as only “not paid what was owed according to current law” is already the biggest form of theft and the least prosecuted.
Please don’t help perpetuate capitalist exploitation by blurring it with the “value theft” inherent to capitalism
It’s probably not wise to try and annoy a being not bound by causality, physics, or conservation of anything. Especially when said entity has previously near-eliminated our population and discarded essentially all of us to our own folly.
(Thankfully She got bored, picked the most stubborn group She could find to remember Her, spent a thousand years trying to teach them to be good, and finally said “oh fuck it, just watch Me”)
That’s why bsky’s pseudo-federation isn’t as big a deal as some ActivityPub boosters claim.
As I understand it, if lemmy.world shuts down or starts demanding cash my only resource would be the same as if Facebook decides I’m too critical of billionaires – start all over elsewhere with a new account. Sure, I could get close to the same experience with a different node, but I’d be a brand new account with no history. I might as well go someplace else entirely.
Bsky’s “portable user” idea fixes that. There are accounts my bsky account follows who switched to blacksky, and if they hadn’t said they’d changed I wouldn’t have noticed. The essential identity of their account shifted almost seamlessly, and they “federate” with everyone else, aside that their appview shows accounts that bsky’s ordinary moderation hides.
I don’t have any illusions about how altruistic the cryptobro VC’s are. But the entirely of their value proposition is that “leaving bsky” should be about as painless as porting your number from Verizon to AT&T.
The claimed reason for that is to highlight “referrer” links for the sites people go to from bsky.
My understanding is that if you click like https://www.themarysue.com/ the website operators would see a “feddit.org” or “lemmy.world” referer if you’re using a web browser and don’t have a defeating option enabled, but not if your browser is locked down or you use an app. The immediate redirects, however, do consistently show in the web site’s access logs.
It’s possible bsky could fuck around with this in the future, but doing so risks just sending users to a pseudo-fork like blacksky.
You’re right about the effect (lawsuits and the threat of the same are more common in America than Canada or the UK) but not at all about the cause.
The USA has had a decades-long choice to have our industry regulated primarily not through government bureaucracy but instead judicial liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_through_litigation
Daredevil has been a “blind batman” for so long a satirical fanfic-turned-unofficial-spinoff got a cartoon, three movies, another movie, and a CGI revival that multiversed back to the cartoon and the original.
Matt Murdock’s no more an anti-hero that Peter Parker was when he tried to break into the fantastic four’s building in hopes they would hire him. (Which they didn’t, mostly because they didn’t actually pay themselves)
3·1 month agoHydrogen is terrible for energy storage, and even worse for energy transport. Especially if you’re doing electrolysis to split water that you then re-generate with atmospheric oxygen in order to produce electricity. A battery, flywheel, or just pumping water upstream gets you far better efficiency, and shipping literally any product of a hydrogen reaction is likely to be more efficient than shipping a heavy H2 tank back and forth.
Solar power in the EU seem to be increasing by 20% year-over-year. It’s hard to see a situation where shipping hydrogen to supply thermal energy to an existing factory would be cheaper than just building a local electrolysis plant and the necessary solar panels. (Unless, of course, you’re already invested or employed in selling hydrogen as a direct fossil fuel replacement.)
Did you perhaps mean hydrocarbons (organic compounds used for fertilizer and fuel) instead of hydrogen (most common element in the universe, 2/3s the atoms and 1/9th the mass of water)
“Actual coverage is less than what’s theoretically possible” is a hell of a way of saying "these things aren’t good enough (yet) to actually replace real people ".
Who is this “user” you’re talking about? Near every choice in a social media platform design is an engineering choice between conflicting priorities.
The troll who wants to post garbage finds it easier, but the earnest poster now needs to filter out trolls on their own.
The person wanting to co-opt a community label finds it easier, but the person who wants it to continue as-used now has no recourse.
The pervert wanting to upload PG boob-shots definitely finds self-moderation easier, but your change would force rape victims with PTSD to let that smut into their already-curated set of communities.
If you wanted to add a new layer of moderation for posters beneath instance owners and community moderators that might be plausible, but “OP posted something dumb and is getting piled on” is a it’s own force your suggestion would abandon.
(And if you think just adding more random part-time moderators to a community would improve its moderation I would encourage to try Improving your next family dinner by giving orders in the kitchen. Especially one that you didn’t plan.)
Yes, I know how one deals with bad moderators in lemmy. Mine is easier.
Easier for who? If every post is self moderated how does a semi-interested reader exclude trolling while still seeing interesting posts? If I want to avoid, say, a “vi v Emacs” flame-war, or keep a “DomeGuyFanboys” topic about me, how does poster-only moderation help me?
Also, my system makes moderation easier. Which makes for better moderators.
Easier for ***whom? *** The person wanting to post whatever they feel like, or the person who wants to browse funny cat pics at work without accidentally seeing porn?
You’re absolutely right that self-curated social media places are considerably easier to either post without fear or create your own pseduo-groups. That’s why famous people tended to be on Twitter and not Reddit.
But the people who want an ActivityPub Twitter already have Mastodon, and those who wanted an ActivityPub Reddit have Lemmy.
Maybe some hybrid interface would be worthwhile, but I don’t think we’ll find out by telling people on a topic-focused environment to be unilaterally person-focused.
No, I would not keep seeing a doctor who demanded I consent to AI to continue being a patient.
Just as I’d stop seeing a doctor who said they now want to ban all vaccines. Or who demands that patients go to their specific church. Or requires that we give blood.
A doctor who asks to use it, however, is entirely tolerable. I don’t mind if my doctor has an LLM look at my MRI scan to help find precancerous growths, and neither should you. But “talk to this chatbot instead of a triage nurse” is an unacceptable level of care.