I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

Are you sure that you actually know how to browse the rooms? I just opened my app, and I see, just for some examples, Linux gaming, vegan, and pine 64 all having activity within the past hour or so.

I mean it’s no discord by any stretch, But you’re actually straight up saying that even the most active ones are 100% dead, there’s something going on with how you’re browsing and looking at the rooms.

I feel like one of the biggest communication problems with stuff relating to open protocols or fediverse stuff, is that no one knows the lay of the land, there’s no broadly held consensus of whether things are active or not, what the culture is like, and you end up with people making confident matter of fact statements that are just transparently not true based on cursory examination.

When Mastodon was new, reporters would just make matter of fact claims that one of its downfalls was that instances couldn’t connect with each other, even though that was called federating and just one of the most basic built-in features. Not that I’m the biggest fan of Blue Sky, but now that people are talking about blue sky, I’ve seen people just matter of factly claim that Blue Sky was 90% furry porn and rage bait. A totally outrageous claim, not even remotely aligned with my experience, but, just because there’s no settled consensus about what’s going on, there’s not really any disincentive for someone just coming in and randomly saying that.

Because it’s pointless.

This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

You have:

• experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
• user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
• study/teaching in academic context
• niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

Right, and to your point, part of that is stymieing focused, direct action and ramping up of industry in the western world. So it makes perfect sense to be a global leader in every part of the EV supply and manufacturing chain while being interested in sowing division elsewhere so there’s no convergence of public interest and policy momentum that grows competitive industries. There’s no contradiction between those two things insofar as they serve China’s interests.

Sounds like the heydey of the Geo Metro, which got astonishing MPG for its time.

is one where our impact as private citizens is as close to nil as it can be

Individual choices aggregate into large scale consequences, and individual choices do matter at scale.

When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.

Amazingly, you’re missing your own point. If it’s not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.

But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift’s emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of “corporations/billionaires”. So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.

But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.

It doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.

other than limiting exhaust, or is that it?

Gee, when you say it like that, it makes extinction-level events sound not so bad! It is That Bad, so that would be the most direct answer.

The important thing to note is that even though some electricity is generated from fossil fuels, EVs eliminate the path-dependency that ties transportation to fossil fuels.

F-Droid is the best starting point. It’s an app that is basically a Google Play style app store, but all the apps are FOSS.

https://f-droid.org/

Right, this is what it means to have a sober and comprehensive look at the issues that separate the parties. Nobody who says both parties are the same ever seems capable of participating in this type of conversation, they just talk in memes.

I agree that there is an unfortunate bipartisan consensus on national security issues that is normalized bombings.

I would nevertheless say you can find significant differences on foreign policy. And, you can find huge huge huge differences on domestic policy, on things like respect for the rule of law, on the type of people appointed to courts, on economic policy.

So I think you raise a legitimate concern, but then you proceed to completely abuse it by trying to make that concern stand in for the whole of everything that matters about political decisions.

Yeah, I would love to get an inside look at what information led to the decision to publish that report.

Wow, I actually believed in this one. Is there a short text version of what the videos are explaining?

I don’t think this is actually a myth. I think there’s an extreme version of the statement, but it nevertheless is true that there are specialized taste buds and that they aggregate on sections on the tongue.

And I think there’s a whole rabbit hole here, of overeager “corrections”, that are not in fact corrections but just someone engaging in bad faith with a statement that’s close enough to the actual truth. It’s actually more wrong to categorically dismiss it, then it would be to note the difference between it and the truth, which is to say while they are not strictly regions, they’re nevertheless as attested to be the NIH:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8956797/

There is undoubtedly a spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus qualities such as sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami, however its importance is currently unknown. Taste thresholds have been shown to differ at different locations within the oral cavity where gustatory receptors are found. However, the relationship between the stimulation of particular taste receptors and the subjective spatially-localized experience of taste qualities is uncertain. Although the existence of the so-called ‘tongue map’ has long been discredited, the psychophysical evidence clearly demonstrates significant (albeit small) differences in taste sensitivity across the tongue, soft palate, and pharynx (all sites where taste buds have been documented).

In my opinion, the more interesting phenomenon is understanding how these facts, and the temptation to correct, challenges our ability to sustain nuance and to carefully differentiate between degrees of truth, instead of just making blanket denials.

I’m not so sure you do get it because it seems like you want to hold protesters to the exact same moral judgment, despite agreeing with a factual analysis of how infrequent the most egregious behaviors were.

If you understand that, and, more importantly comprehend it, then that needs to cash out in your moral assessment of what happened, otherwise you have no business saying you agree or that you understand.

If the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, then the opposite of “I understand” is not “I don’t understand”, it’s “I understand, but still…”

It’s comments like this that make me glad Lemmy has a star that lets you favorite them. Thank you very much.

There’s so many levels on which it is deeply concerning. One is just on the face value. They actually did storm the capital, the security forces in place seemed ambivalent or perhaps actually complicit to some degree. Nevertheless, numerous people were injured or died.

And then there’s everything about the precedent it sets for next time, the excuses and defenses being made of it, and the ways in which those sympathetic to it may prepare to execute on the same idea again in the future, perhaps learning from prior lessons, and perhaps confident that they won’t face any legal exposure.

It’s a horrifying idea to have been allowed to take root in the form of real physical actions, which are then carried forward in culture to set the stage for future actions.

It could factor in to stuff relating to Israel in the Middle East. Although, like other commenters here, I don’t know much about this and I’d like to see some more substantiation.

I’ve got to disagree here. Well, partially agree partially disagree. I think it’s absolutely the case that your example qualifies, making a big deal about representation of Nazis in the armed forces is a kind of big lie that’s just getting repeated without any sense of context or proportionality.

But I don’t think it’s a both sides thing the way you’re making it out to be. You’re acknowledging that it’s Russia being worse than Ukraine, but it’s not merely a difference of one being slightly worse, it’s a huge part of the Russian narrative, whereas it factors in in no way whatsoever in Ukraine’s message to the outside world. Ukraine has made historical analogies, in major speeches and communications to the outside world, but has not made the case that their sovereignty is legitimized due to anything having to do with Nazi representation in the Russian armed forces. It just doesn’t at all play an equal role in the moral cases they’re making.

Surprisingly, yes! I ended up opting for Libre cloud, a paid next cloud provider. You can get there two terabyte monthly plan for $15 a month, and then if you go through the steps of leaving, you can get a half off price of $7.50 a month as a lifetime discount. At least I was offered that.