A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

Yes. CA is looking to get single payer, but that has a longer runway because America.

California comes pretty close.

To little fanfare, as the new year has gotten underway, California has closed one of the largest remaining gaps in its healthcare coverage system. As of January 1, all low-income Californians, no matter their immigration status, no matter their age, qualify for healthcare coverage.

It’s a dead man’s party

Who could ask for more?

This may be the most poorly written article I’ve ever read. It’s completely unintelligible.

It must have been written by a really poorly trained LLM and just posted without anyone having looked at it. Forget artificial intelligence - this is artificial stupidity.

I don’t know. I’ve seen things far worse than a vaguely Pride-aligned Treebeard.

I like their trackpads a lot, but if you use the MacBook with an external monitor like so many of us do, it’s simply not an option. I stick with Logitech for mice though. Even their crappy mice are good, and their high end mice are great.

I also have to disagree with the author’s take on the evolution of the mouse. I like having buttons to navigate forward and back when browsing the web, I like the multifunction scroll wheels, and I even like the sideways scroll wheels when looking through large charts or tables of data. When I used to game more on services like WoW, I had a mouse with a ton of buttons mapped to all kinds of macros and skills.

The only people I don’t see using mice or external trackpads are PM types who don’t use external monitors and spend 80% of their days moving from meeting to meeting.

The Apple trackpad has remained in my opinion the best one ever developed and continues to improve generation to generation. They lost the script on keyboards for a hot minute there, and their mice have always been horrible to the point of deliberate non-functionality, but those trackpads are amazing. Their external trackpad has also come a long way in the past few years.

90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.

I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.

Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.

I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).

The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).

I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.

Seven(?) fingers, very weird abs, ribs, and I am not sure if that’s supposed to be a mutant pelvis or what.

I’m sure they’ll continue to improve these things, but in general AI art gets worse the closer you look. Zoom in, take about five or ten minutes to pan around and study the images, and things just start to leap out. After that, you can’t not see them.

I have read about individuals doing this, but to my knowledge it has never happened in any sufficient numbers to tilt a primary in any state.

Some states run open primaries, so that any person can vote in any (but only one) primary. Other states run closed primaries, such that any voter who has registered as a member of that party can vote in that particular party’s primary. Yet others (eg, California last time I checked) have mixed modes. I believe the CA GOP primary is closed by the Democratic primary is open.

You can tell relatively easily by the number of votes in any given primary election whether they’re consistent in terms of turnout with previous years. As far as I’ve ever read, they tend to be year over year consistent. The one trend that has been noted in recent years is a small but as far as I know steady increase in independent voters (who as stated may or may not be able to vote in primaries depending on their state, but based on number of votes cast do not seem to have been a deciding factor in primary votes).

I generally have suspected that the idea of people switching parties to act as primary spoilers is largely just projection, as we tend to expect malfeasance of the Other, but the hard truth is that you can barely get large numbers of people to vote in actual elections, much less in something like a primary.

Now I have a machine gun

Ho ho ho

From their q&a:

gitspamdum is a bot, I just created a fake account and bid for 999 trillions, no verification were requested in the whole process and 1 nanosecond later gitspamdum bid after me, I tried this twice, my only purpose was to expose the absurdity of the whole thing, if Proton really take this thing seriously please just cancel all auctions and place them in a serious website

“Romans go home!”

“Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes they go the house?”

This exercise recurs regularly and there have been a few formulations.

One of the big ones is atomic theory. It took a long time to figure out - and I’m intentionally discounting the Greek version and monads here because I’m talking about actual atomic theory and not a philosophy of essences.

Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics are a second option, especially if you could squeeze in things like the germ theory of disease.

I’m not familiar enough with pure math to say that there’s one concept that would have let the Greeks or Mesopotamians develop the calculus millennia earlier than we did, but that would also massively accelerate scientific progress.

NotLD is not a great example.

George Romero literally invented the modern zombie. NotLD was massively successful on its own, and spawned a genre of horror literature that to this day is a dominant trend. It was a brilliant piece in a college-level production. It was a lot like Clerks, but even more so.

NotLD became public domain when they changed the name of the film from Night of the Flesh Eaters to Night of the Living Dead. While the change was obviously brilliant, the distributor didn’t include the copyright notice in the updated prints that were sent to the theater. That one mistake by someone else cost Romero untold tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think we are all in favor of work being published in the public domain. As a scientist, I paid thousands of dollars per paper for everything I published to make sure they weren’t locked behind a $30 paywall. I’ve been a vocal supporter of FOSS since my first slackware install in the mid-1990s, and even before that with the cypherpunk community on usenet.

But NotLD is a counterexample of the goodness of non-copyrighted and non-patented works. It was not only done without the permission of the creator - which is key to the ethos - it is taken advantage of by every third rate company who sells a copy of it for $1.99.

What’s lower in terms of quality?

The e-ink display is different than something like an iPad. I find it easier to read, to be honest. I can read the kindle for longer in comfort and it’s easier to read while falling asleep.

It’s crap at displaying anything that’s not intended for the platform. PDF files or graphics heavy books are a poor fit for the kindle, but novels or regular books are far better in my opinion.

I have an iPhone, an iPad Mini, an iPad, and multiple laptops. I prefer the kindle for reading in any formats that support it.

I think the faster your connection, the less you can get away with for drive space. At one point, I was living in a place where the absolute fastest available internet was 1.5 meg dsl and where my actual connection speed hovered around dialup levels. I had massive amounts of local storage because I didn’t want to download anything more than once, and nothing was more soul crushing than getting a game on dvd so I didn’t have to worry about downloading it, and then still have to wait while it downloaded gigs worth of patches. Buying a game meant days of downloading, which I’d have to let run while at work because literally nothing else could be happening while a download was occurring. I now have gigabit ethernet.

I moved completely over to a steam deck for pc gaming. I rarely even think about how long a game takes to download, even in the case of a game like BG3 (which is great, btw - it’s a shockingly legit successor to the BG franchise and this is going to be one of those games that people remember for a decade or more).

In any case, I bought a deck with 512G a few months ago, and grabbed a 1tb card for it. I haven’t downloaded my entire library onto it, much less any non-steam games, but I find that the ability to go from thinking about playing a game to playing it in about the time it takes to get and eat a sandwich vastly changes the equation. Non-AAA games download in minutes.

Anyway, upgrading your internet speed may not be something available to everyone, because many places still have crap infrastructure, and some ISPs still have data caps. Mine thankfully doesn’t because I ended up moving so much data downloading to my new deck on top of 4k video streaming that I would be blowing through it monthly.

If you can’t upgrade your speed, upgrade your storage. You can use cheaper external drives with physical platters and either store games on there that don’t throttle on low rate io, or at least store the install files for games that you can then move over to your ssd. Back in the day when a 40mb hdd was considered large, we used to write scripts that would compress and uncompress games on the fly. I think wing commander with the voice pack by itself took up most of my drive.

tl;dr Think about investing in one or a few tb of external storage.

It’s actually impossible to obey road rules, by design. Any cop will tell you that, if they follow you for long enough, they will have an excuse to pull you over. Being too close to the lane markers. Marginally over the speed limit. Cracked windshield. Something dangling from your rear view mirror. Phone/GPS mount on windshield or dashboard. Following distance. Weaving inside your lane. They can even tailgate you and bust you for speeding if you speed up. I even know someone who got a ticket for not speeding up with a cop car tailgating him - with no lights on - for blocking an emergency vehicle.

You can obviously make it more likely you will get pulled over. Excessive speed, dangerous driving, or being of an ethnic minority all should be avoided. But honestly, the only thing actually protecting you is the herd around you and the cop not wanting to be bothered.