Hypervigilant supertaster and bibliophile. I am not a bot! I am a human being!

  • 6 Posts
  • 71 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Wouldn’t e-bikes be a relatively stopgap measure? They still require a relatively advanced and carbon-wasteful technological base, after all: maintenance and repair for the bikes themselves (including regular replacement batteries, which are definitely NOT environmentally friendly), plus paved roads in good repair (again, requiring a lot of fossil fuel expenditure).

    There’s also the likelihood that as the Earth’s environment becomes increasingly hazardous we’ll require protection from the elements more and more often - protection which would be difficult to add to a bike of any sort.

    The US military has projected that basic infrastructure in the USA will be collapsing throughout much of the country in less than twenty years. It’s hard to see how ebikes will be practical under those conditions. Gearing towards long-term lower-tech solutions would seem to be a wiser choice.





  • It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

    I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.






  • So what? We’ll create one!

    Years ago the owners of GoodReads announced that Amazon had taken away their access to the Amazon book database. It was an existential threat, they said, and asked the GoodReads community to volunteer to create a new book database to replace Amazon’s. Hundreds or thousands of us worked for free, donating thousands or tens of thousands of hours to the project.

    And then GoodReads announced that they’d sold out to Amazon. Apparently they’d been in negotiations with those bastards the whole time they were lying to us about losing access to the database. Maybe proving that they could sucker their loyal users into donating free labor helped raise the selling price of GoodReads a little.

    As for the database we created, I guess it’s Amazon’s now. Of course, if we create a movie database of our own, NOBODY will be able to buy it! And we can make it available for free use, if we want.



  • BobQuasit@beehaw.orgOPtoChat@beehaw.orgIs Reddit watching us?
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    1 year ago

    But those are some of the highest contributors, I’d bet. That 75,000 might well represent a hole in the Reddit’s hull that will end up sinking the ship.

    They’re certainly enough that a substantial percentage of the total Reddit user population - at least the involved ones - are now aware that there is an alternative to Reddit. That’s huge. As Reddit continues to go downhill - and it has to, that IPO is coming - and Reddit management continues to screw users and mods, more and more people will jump ship.

    June 30th, the 3Pocalypse, will trigger the next major wave. Each reduction or elimination of NSFW content will trigger another. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Reddit doesn’t make more serious unforced errors along the way.

    And spez et alia aren’t quite as stupid as many believe. They don’t care about 75,000, sure. But they can read the tea leaves as well as anyone else. Their major concern has to be that the emigration from Reddit to Lemmy could impact the value of the IPO. It’s a clear danger, albeit only a potential one at this point.

    Oh, they’re watching all right.