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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • I would agree to this but with one caveat Let’s try to be better than Reddit. These days, Reddit and to some degree let me also has become a circle jerk of closed minds (on all sides of any issue). When confronted with a position they disagree with, people are far too quick to write the person off as a racist, statist, Nazi, anarchist, commie, etc. Rather than considering the merit of the person statement. Let’s be better than that. Let’s all be better than that.

    Having a closed mind is easy. It’s lazy. It gets you to that hit of dopamine faster, you tell someone off and hit post and you feel like you’ve done good. But most of the time you haven’t. You’ve done nothing to persuade them of your viewpoint, or enhance the discussion for others.

    That’s not to say nobody’s wrong. There’s plenty of people who are wrong about every issue. But tell them why they’re wrong. Have a little good faith, assume that just maybe the person on the other end of the thread has good intentions, also wants the world to succeed and society to be great, they just think their view will help make that happen better. So rather than calling them an idiot, tell them why you’re right and your ideas are better. Engage with them.

    That’s how Reddit used to be. Not recently, I’m talking way back in the early days before the digg migration. It was a place for intelligent people to have reasoned discussions. Let’s make lemmy more like that.





  • For switches / dimmers try Inovelli. Very very very tweakable. Can program things like minimum dim level, so even when you command 1% it still puts out enough power to start the LED bulb. And it will report taps and multitaps up to five taps as scene control actions. They also have a fan canopy module which can receive zigbee commands directly from a switch so the main paddle controls the light bulb and the secondary button above the LED bar controls the fan speed.


  • Of course it’s their choice. But I also think some people in some situations should recognize a broader responsibility. Because we get into a larger question of, what happens when the public square is privately owned?

    With a website like joinfediverse, that domain becomes a primary resource for people looking to get into decentralized platforms. By not including something, the maintainer is not just making the choice for himself but for every new user who visits the site. That responsibility should be taken seriously and the choice not just made based on personal opinion.

    Think of it this way, imagine I made a site called whoshouldIvotefor.com and it would ask you questions and then recommend a political candidate. Sounds like a good idea, right? Now what if I make it so the site always recommends a Republican candidate, and only justifies why the answers you gave to the questions indicate that vote? I’m certainly allowed to do that. Free speech and all. But it could be argued that I also have a responsibility to the voters who come to my site who don’t realize it is biased, in that I am pushing my personal opinions on them and causing them to make a decision that they wouldn’t have made if they had all the facts.

    (Disclaimer- I’m not a Republican, I consider myself liberal-libertarian. I’m using that as an example.)

    I am just saying that a site which sets itself up as an authoritative on ramp to the fediverse should try to be unbiased and not based on personal opinions of its editor.


  • Well, since you’ve vocally criticised the developers and they haven’t bothered changing their ways, wouldn’t you agree they deserve to be gatekept?

    No. In fact, I strongly dislike that whole attitude of ‘do what I want or else I will cancel you’. I am not the arbiter of what is ultimately right and wrong and neither are you and neither is parent commenter.

    I believe people have the right to make their own choice. And since Lemmy has significant user base and significant active discussion and thousands of communities, I think the users have the right to make that choice for themselves. Make them aware of the situation, make them aware of the potential downsides, make them aware that lemmy.ml is run by tankie assholes, maybe recommend some better instances, and let them choose for themselves.

    That is why I like Lemmy and the fediverse as a concept. I can choose the instance that has the policies that I want. Among those policies is which other instances to defiederate from.





  • Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday. And also not something most little planes have, it’s part of a top of the line autopilot system. Given that everything for airplanes costs way too much due to ridiculous certification requirements that do more to keep safety tech out of people’s budgets then to improve safety, not many little planes have it. To take a basic Cessna type airplane and add the system can cost as much as a car.

    You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.


  • Pilot here.
    There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.

    If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.


  • create an out-group so they can control the in-group

    That’s not just the media. It’s basically everyone in power. Media, politics, government, corporations… Everyone.

    It applies to the Democrats too. Especially in the 2016 election, they managed to successfully make Republicans the out-group. But I believe that was hugely damaging to the country, it created a lot more division when what is really needed is unity to focus on the issues that most people can agree on.

    Because here’s the cold truth- there is a body of policies that probably 80% of Americans would agree on. Things like efficient government, ending government corruption, reducing corporate control over government and elections, reducing income inequality, etc.
    To quote Dylan Ratigan’s famous rant, the United States is being extracted. And I think most people would like to stop that extraction.
    But no major candidate stands for that. Bernie did, but the DNC iced him out because their wealthy corporate donors didn’t want Bernie.

    And that in my opinion is why Trump won. Harris certainly didn’t push any major message of radical reform, just a bunch of the usual ‘help the middle class’ talk. Trump may be terrifying, but he does push a message of radical reform and changing the system.
    To write that off and say half the country is racist or misogynist is to avoid learning from this situation.


  • I think most commenters here are missing the point.

    There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around their little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

    Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

    For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
    So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.


  • Quantity isn’t everything

    That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It’s a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
    But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.

    Success to me doesn’t mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don’t need Reddit and Twitter.


  • My 2c-
    It is well understood that China and USA need each other. And that has generally been seen as a desirable situation, if only to prevent the two of us from needlessly going to war over some stupid nonsense.
    US has basically outsourced all manufacturing to China, to the point that it would take a decade or more to undo that. We depend on them, they depend on us too.

    Most of this is just boilerplate recognition and encouragement of that fact. Stating in a great many words that China wants to continue to be a US ally. But it is also a warning, that China is not a third world nation that the US can boss around as it sees fit. So China is warning us to follow through on our word and generally be honest and do what we say.

    The red line things are the real meat of that. This is an instruction / warning to Donald Trump and his incoming team. So the whole message basically says we will work with you and be friends but don’t fuck with us on these four issues.

    Unfortunately, those are kind of four issues that we really should fuck with them on. USA should not turn a blind eye to human rights violations of any ally, regardless of our level of dependence on them.

    And US should absolutely not support China taking over Taiwan. Not just for reasons of principle, but for our own ends- Taiwan produces an awful lot of the world’s computer chips. If China gains control of TSMC, that essentially puts them in control of the US economy because if TSMC stops sending us chips, the vast majority of the supply from Qualcomm, AMD, Apple, and others just goes away.

    Our strategy so far has been to officially acknowledge the ‘One China’ policy that includes Taiwan as part of China, while simultaneously taking actions to help Taiwan stay independent. China is calling us out for that here.




  • Here’s a fun one

    You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.

    Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.

    You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.

    So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.

    Enjoy your swim!