The smaller alternatives will get bigger as the mainstream social media gets worse and worse. The job for us, in whatever way we can, is to build the alternatives and make them ready to handle the influx, and make them welcoming to new people.
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Honestly, if you're going to do both, do bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky isn't properly decentralised the way mastodon is, but a lot of influential people are there. Also it's way better than twitter was.
I have a Qidi X-Plus 4. There are a lot of reviews online raving about its reliability, how it's the first production-ready printer that's also affordable for hobbyists. It's also got Klipper firmware, which is open, so it can't be locked down the way the Bambu ones are.
My old printer is a 10 year old prusa clone kit, which I wrestled with the whole time I had it. Compared to that, the Qidi is a dream.
If you're on 110v power, make sure you get the fixed relay board. The original one can't handle the higher amperage of the lower voltage power.
My gender is a null-pointer.
Only if it's performance sensitive. Otherwise you're wasting programmer time both writing and reading the code, and you've made it less maintainable with more complexities where bugs can creep in.
The vast majority of the time you can afford a few wasted bits.
Honestly though I don't quite understand why a compiler couldn't optimise this process. Like it knows what a boolean is, surely it could reduce them down to bits.
These people just want to talk about gadgets and none of the political implications, even though those implications are unavoidable. They are the classic centrist "apolitical" people who don't realise they have politics, but they're just default status quo acceptance and ignorance of oppression.
This is just an old man yelling at clouds. If the mods of this sub wanted to change the topics, they could, but it would probably tank the sub. The people complaining could start their own sub with their own rules, but I'll bet it's not nearly as popular. Plus it takes work, and people who think it's a good use of their time to passive-aggressively whine about a sub they don't maintain aren't going to do that much work. They're not cut out for it.
What if I told you that television shows were dangerous? It's true. In the year 2000, four out of every five injuries occurred in a home that owned a VHS copy of Robocop III. Someone might say, "That's compelling Robocorrelation, but that data alone does not suggest Robocausation." Fine. But maybe your first instinct was to say, "Robocop III is a movie, not a TV show, you fucking dumbass." If so, then congratulations, idiot, you're a Technical Genius. You're smart enough to spot a technicality, but too dumb to know everyone else did too and it was light years away from the point. You're the kind of person who tells your doctor, "Um, it's Chief Chirpa?" when he tells you that getting the Wicket doll out of your asshole will require surgery. "And, um," you'll add, "it's an action figure? Maybe you should have gone to a non-stupid medical school."
The nice thing about being a Technical Genius is that it feels like proof you're smarter than everyone. They can say you don't "get it" all day, but they're the imbeciles who think Robocop III is a TV show. Look at it like this: You are the only one in the history of Koala Times Bus Tours to contract syphilis from a koala bite. You might be embarrassed, but at least you aren't like those other fools screaming "Don't touch the koala bears!" when they are in fact marsupials. I mean, if koalas were actual bears, your whole face would be missing, not still here and covered in pulsing chancres.
Technical Geniuses reach maximum annoying when they decide that pointing out technicalities is a sense of humor. For instance, if you announced, "My wife is pregnant and we're having a boy," a Technical Genius might quip, "Well, technically only women can have babies. Unless you count the Chief Chirpa action figure currently breaching my anus -- um, which you should, since it is the dictionary definition. Heard of it? Hey, everyone! This idiot with no dictionary is watching me shit out a Chief Chirpa, and he doesn't even know which gender gives birth!"
Or most people who do this job can't afford to get deliveries themselves so they never encounter the problem themselves, and they're not paid enough to actually care about it. Their energy is spent thinking about getting to the next delivery, not doing each one perfectly.
I'm a developer too, and I appreciate the offer very much, but I'm not really in a situation where I could work on something like this. It's just an idea though, anyone could run with it.
I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people's needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.
If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.
This would be a really good fit for federation I think.
Nobody has this drawer. They're all lying to you, it's some big in-joke like that reddit thread where that person was asking how to switch from Spanish to English and everybody replied in Spanish. You should stand your ground and tell your wi--I can't even joke about the level of gaslighting that would entail. Everybody has this drawer.
I'll be honest though, the scales are a poor fit and probably make it way more cramped. You can stand those up sideways at the edge of a cupboard or in whatever place that you keep cutting boards, because they're a similar shape.
Depending on how often each thing is used, you could optimise by figuring out a hanging solution for some of them. That's quite a common thing, hanging under cupboards or on the backsplash part of the wall. Your wife might appreciate something like that as long as it's agreed on. You'll never totally get rid of this though.
Many such cases.
I'm glad you appreciate it, it was as much an excuse for me to unload that rant as anything else :)
But we actually get into trouble when our models of reality are poor. Our nature isn't self destructive at all, look at how many times we've been at the brink of nuclear annihilation and someone said, "actually don't", some of them in defiance of entrenched power structures that punished them for it.
We've had that world ending button for most of the last century, and we've never used it. If we really, on an instinctual level, were self-destructive we never would've evolved.
I think the real problem is the power structures that dominate us, and how we allow them to. They are aberrant, like tumours. They have an endless growth strategy, which just like in malignant tumours tend to kill the host. If they're destroyed, the host can go on to live a complete life.
And things can change fast, these structures are tenacious but fragile. Look at the UHC assassination - claims immediately started getting approved. After decades of entrenched screwing over of people, they flipped on their back the moment they were threatened. How many other seemingly intractable problems could be cut out tomorrow if we applied the right kind of pressure?
I wouldn't put too much stock in notions of a great filter. The "Fermi paradox" is not a paradox, it's speculation. It misses the mark on how unbelievably unlikely life is in the first place. It relies on us being impressed by big numbers and completely forgetting about probabilities as we humans tend to do what with our gambler's fallacies and so on.
Even the Drake equation forgets about galactic habitable zones, or the suitability of the stars themselves to support life. Did you know that our star is unusually quiet compared to what we observe? We already know that's a very rare quality of our situation that would allow the stable environment that life would need. Then there's chemical composition, atmosphere, magnetosphere, do we have a big Jupiter out there sweeping up most of the cataclysmic meteors that would otherwise wipe us out?
All these probabilities stack up, and the idea that a life-supporting planet is more common than one in 400 billion stars is ludicrously optimistic, given how fast probabilities can stack up. You're about as likely to win the Lotto, and it seems to me the conditions for life would be a little more complex than that, not to mention the probability that it actually does evolve.
I think it might be possible that life only happens once in a billion galaxies, or even less frequently. There might not be another living organism within our local galactic cluster's event horizon. Then you have to ask about how frequent intelligent life, to the point of achieving interstellar travel, is.
You know why your favourite science youtuber brushed right past the rare earth hypothesis and started talking about the dark forest? Because one of those makes for fun science-adjacent speculation, and the other one doesn't.
It also relies on the notion that resources are scarce, completely brushing over the fact that going interstellar to accumulate resources is absolutely balls to the wall bonkers. Do you know how much material there is in our asteroid belt? Even colonising the Moon or Mars is an obscenely difficult task, and Fermi thinks going to another star system, removed from any hope of support by light years, is something we would do because we needed more stuff? It's absurd to think we'd ever even consider the idea.
But even then, Fermi said that once a civilisation achieves interstellar travel it would colonise a galaxy in about "a million years". Once again relying on us being impressed by big numbers and forgetting the practicalities of the situation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so this motherfucker is telling us with a straight face that we're going to colonise the galaxy, something we already know is unfathomably hard, at approximately ten percent of the speed of light? That is an average rate of expansion in all directions. Bitch, what?
If we did it at 0.0001c, that's an average speed of 30km/s, including the establishment of new colonies that could themselves send out new colonies, because it's no good to just zoom through the galaxy waving at the stars as they go past. That seems amazingly generous of a speed, assuming we can even find one planet in range we could colonise. Then we could colonise the galaxy in about a billion years.
Given the universe is 14 billion years old and the complex chemistry needed for life took many billions of years to appear, and life on our rock took many billions of years to evolve, then the idea that we haven't met any of our neighbours - assuming they even exist - doesn't seem like a paradox at all. It doesn't seem like a thing that needs explanation unless you're drumming up sensational content for clicks. I mean, no judgement, people gotta eat, but that's a better explanation for why we care so much about this non-problem.
No, the Fermi paradox is pop-science. It's about as scientific as multiversal FTL time travel. Intelligence is domain-specific, and Fermi was good at numbers, he wasn't an exobiologist.
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I'm sorry, which part of your comment do you suppose relates to me?
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This week on How to Raise an Entire Generation With an Intimate Knowledge of Counter-Surveillance: Ban Their Favourite Social Media!
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If you hear David Graeber talk about it, the IMF and the World Bank's power was shattered after occupy, countries weren't willing to accept their terms anymore because the word was out that leaders who did that were selling out their own people. Things changed, but there are powerful hegemonic forces at work to stop us from hearing about it. They want us to believe we are powerless.
Just because you didn't storm the bastille yet doesn't mean nothing is being done. Most direct action is on the ground and invisible. That's why it looks like decades pass with nothing happening, then overnight everything changes.
Yeah, and that's all true, but in the comment I replied to was room for the implication that "mob justice" is a problem somehow.
We're told it would be chaos, some great threat to society, but like, the only examples of mobs that I can think of doing any real damage are groups whose immediate aims were supported by the ruling class. Lynchings in the US south were openly permitted and encouraged by the entrenched white supremacist police state. Witch burnings were encouraged by the state to disenfranchise women from power over their own bodies, and they laid the foundations for capitalism.
Then those horrific examples of state oppression are presented to us as examples of the horrors that await if we were to ever stop bowing to that same state and take matters into our own hands.
Even if the person making the comment didn't intend to reinforce that notion, it's a default assumption for many people and I didn't want it to stand unchallenged.
Businesses I understand because that involves listening to your tech guy and approving time for it, and businesses hate spending money, even if it wouldn't really cost them that much in practice. They have a lot of institutional inertia.