No, we are both dreaming butterflies.

Such a choom.

I have an idea. What if we attached a power line directly to the car, so we didn’t need a battery? Of course, it’d only be able to run on specialized lines. To get the most out of those lines, we could chain cars together. And since the specialized hardware doesn’t make sense to own, we could have municipalities own them and charge a fare (or better yet, just make it part of taxes).

I get what you’re saying and that’s obviously a concern, but at the same time… doesn’t it have to be reasonably far in the future? We don’t have either the infrastructure or even enough supply of EVs to change this too quickly.

That said, I wish they’d use a gradual approach. Start ramping up taxes on gasoline with the proceeds entirely going to EV infrastructure (and similar for purchasing new gasoline vehicles and licensing existing vehicles). Start small and increase as we get closer to the cutoff date. Start limiting gas station development and create zoning regulations for EV infrastructure (especially charging for apartments, which is a huge gap). Make all the laws ramp up gradually so that it’s always small, incremental changes that are never too difficult to do at a time, but will get us in a better place in 10-15 years.

I badly wish that I could get (competent) home assistants with at least somewhat customizable activation keywords. I understand why it’s not customizable. They build it into the hardware so that it doesn’t have to be truly listening all the time. But I’d love at least some options to buy versions that have different phrases.

For me, I just want something that references some pop culture AI (eg, HAL, Glados, etc). I especially don’t like Google’s approach of saying the freaking company name.

In Ruby, 0 and "" is truthy,

What the fuck?

I like the idea of having a regulated, living, backwards compatible standard. Which seems to be what USB-C is now, for phones. The EU has soon to be active regulation that will make it a requirement for many things. Yet, it’s not a single, set in stone standard, but one that’s constantly being expanded (eg, version 3.2 and PD).

Of course, the regulation has to also be living. Eg, at some point, maybe there’ll be a strong enough reason to allow another standard (by no means do I think USB-C will always make sense). And the regulation has to very carefully choose the standard.

That way we get the benefits of standardization (from actually everyone using the same format), but we aren’t unreasonably crippling ourselves to do it.

The cult of personality thing is the big part IMO. If it was just him being a piece of shit without any influence, then whatever. But he has a cult following that are influenced by him and his actions (plus Twitter seems now designed to push his thoughts). It’s important that the vast majority of people understand that Musk is an idiot and a piece of shit. It needs to be lame and gross to like him.

Assuming we’re talking about outdoors, that’s not the case for me in my area. There’s only so much layers can do. You have to limit exposure. Plus all those layers can be a chore. By comparison, while summer heat can be uncomfortable, it’s rarely deadly and far easier to stay safe.

Lol, yesterday it felt like there was at least half a dozen posts about Firefox, mostly claiming that YouTube was slowing them down. Which seemed really bad at first, till I dug into it and saw it was probably an unintended bug with ad handling.

And why were there so many posts? Who wants to see the same post more than once?

That’s why, when I leave ransom ware outside of offices, I buy the pink ones and put stickers on em.

That’s what I thought it was at first too. But regular employees aren’t usually all that interested in their company being profit driven. Especially AI researchers. Most of those that I know are extremely passionate about ethics in AI.

But do they know things we don’t know? They certainly might. Or it might just be bandwagoning or the likes.

Those prices feel so expensive, too. Like, does the news cost more to produce than full length movies and TV shows? Cause all the streaming video apps are far cheaper than 9€ a week. The only thing 9€ is cheap for is if you would have been buying a newspaper daily. Incidentally, newspapers have ads despite being bought, so that might explain why they kept ads in the web version too?

A price like that may have made sense in the pre internet days, when a newspaper was a big chunk of my daily reading due to general lack of alternatives. But these days? I probably only read a single digit number of articles per day about the biggest headlines. And since I get lots of news from social media like Lemmy, it crosses many websites, which is unconductive with subscribing. Plus it feels like a sizable chunk of news articles are just quoting AP or Reuters these days, anyway.

Mind you, I’m also Canadian. We have a fully publically funded news service (the CBC) that isn’t paywalled and generally high quality.

Yeah. I worry every day that there’ll be an article on the front page that says Israel actually did nuke Gaza. It’s a very real concern given how things are going.

“We are acting with full transparency whilst maintaining the safety of our troops and operational readiness.”

Uh huh. Yup. Sure you are.

Who’s better known for their “full transparency” than the IDF?

Yeah, I make hella good lasagna and have never used a white sauce in it. It’s always been a red sauce. Just a ton of cheeses like you say (“some” is an understatement lol).

Yeah. A smidge under 4 GB and it’s was a five figure cost? That is complete bullshit. We all know the actual costs are miniscule. It’s mad price gouging because most people don’t need to roam and thus they can can prey on it. It shouldn’t be possible to get anywhere close to that kinda bill without multiple explicit approvals where the costs are clearly communicated (I can’t tell if they were).

While I think the rich are one of the most influential sources of it, I’m not convinced they’re the only or even the majority. Like, of the rich stopped using bigotry to divide people, would people stop being bigoted? I don’t think so at all. I think there’s something wrong with humanity that makes it easy for bigotry to evolve even in the absence of power and perhaps worse, for people to want to be bigoted.

This study won’t answer the question of if this applies to other countries, but I expect it would. Covid sure brought a lot of anti vax people into the limelight. Yet none of the issues you mentioned are a problem in my country. That’s all free (except for the hospital parking).

Same. It’s frustrating that my legitimate prescription has to jump through so many hurdles and face skepticism because of its usefulness as a recreational drug (or occupational, I guess?).