Yesterday I went to IKEA (i.e. suburb-to-suburb). Google Maps said:
Car: 20 min
Public Transit: 1h20min
Bicycle: 1h
So.... Technically it is possible. However no-one does this unless they are forced to by their circumstances. We've begun building one tram line and the construction process has gone so catastrophically the entire country knows about it. At this rate the urban transition away from the car will be done by 2250.
One thing I've learned as a non-French francophone: whatever you think is going on with the relations between Paris and overseas France, it's about 100x more complicated than you think.
Generally these populations want (and in the case of Nouvelle Calédonie I believe have regularly and recently reaffirmed via referendum) to remain part of France. However, the socio-political situation of each of these overseas territories is unique, complex, and often tense and dividing even for the locals.
For complete strangers to pass a harsh judgement such as "imperialist pigs" based on this article alone would be an ironic form of imperialism/paternalism. If the democratically-elected local government asks for national help, then I would very (!) cautiously agree that it makes sense that they would receive this help.
High school chemistry felt less like imperfect modeling and more like alchemy that sometimes yields tangible results. I can't remember specifics anymore but there were many moments where I was like "you're using too many shortcuts and this doesn't make any damn sense mathematically or dimensionally anymore". I know real chemistry is too complex to fit a high school program, but the way it was taught really was like a soft science cosplaying as a hard science.
Also chemists would use any pressure units before they used Pa. mmHg as a unit suffers from congenital defects I can only assume stem from repeated inbreeding.
New notification, old notification, either way it auto-dismisses the system notification after 5 seconds. Why? I guess they don't trust the DE to manage notifications properly??
So my colleagues know if they send me a message I'll get to it when I'll get to it because I probably will have missed the notification.
It makes sense... until you learn about the 13th/14th month of the year. Having to multiply the monthly salary by 13.x (depending on the collective agreement of course) to get the taxable income makes imperial measurements sound logical.
Give me yearly or give me hourly, but monthly makes no sense under the current system.
What's the point of automated steering if you have to remain 100 % attentive? To spare the driver the terrible burden of moving the wheel a couple mm either way? It is well studied and observed that people are less attentive when they're not actively driving, which, FUCKING DUH.
Manufacturers provide this feature for the implicit purpose of enabling distracted driving. Yet they will not accept liability if someone drives distractedly.
Next in We Are Not Liable For How Consumers Use Our Product, Elon will replace the speedometer by Candy Crush with small text that says "pwease do not use while dwiving UwU".
A bunch of countries just have their own flag as an emoji... The author barely managed to identify which emoji tourists use when posting about their trip on twitter.
I don't think twitter users in authoritarian hellholes are acting like NPCs going "Glory to Artsotzka" every five minutes.
It's tourism, coupled with low twitter use from the local population. Belgium has a bigger population than Belarus and unlike it isn't an authoritarian hellhole. But it's way more touristy. So Belgium has its own flag as the most used emoji but Belarus doesn't.
You can see this pattern pretty clearly in the ME as well. Jordan, Yemen, or Syria don't have their own flag as their most used emoji (despite being both small and undemocratic), because there ain't any tourists there. Qatar does. (A bit surprised about Cyprus though, do they use twitter a lot?)
The data is probably sound, but the methodology is insane.
TL;DW: The modern concept of gender as separate from sex was not (originally) a progressive move. It was conservatives' reaction to the medical discoveries of the nebulous nature of biological sex, to justify imposing the gender binary on trans people and especially intersex children.
Conservatives claim to care a lot about protecting trans kids from "radical decisions", but the places that enact legislation to prevent teenagers from using puberty blockers are the same places that still allow and encourage mutilating surgeries on intersex babies.
It is not an accident. It is ideologically consistent with conservatives' drive to impose their religious and cultural vision of the binary gender as a completely fixed universal truth, and they'll use extreme violence to ensure it remains binary, fixed and universal.
I know Brave browser has had a lot of controversy in the past regarding their business practices, including rolling out their own crypto-coin.
They apparently make the really bold claim of using their own index exclusively. If true (given their track record I am not 100 % willing to accept that as truth without seeing some independent analysis), that would do wonders for the search ecosystem. I'm definitely interested to see how it pans out.
A London surgeon who has provided testimony over the current war in Gaza after operating during the conflict has been denied entry to France, where he was due to speak in the French senate later on Saturday....
The other article I read said that the guy was invited by a member of the opposition (EELV, the Greens), and when contacted the Élysée (head office of the executive) literally said "there's not much the police could do about a Schengen ban".
.... i.e. of course France could have allowed him in. The executive just chose not to exercise its power because that would not have benefitted the majority.
Kagi is just Google's index with fancy features and filtering on top. They include a few other sources but for regular search it's almost always going to be Google's index providing the base results.
Wow, looks like they just updated that page and removed all references to their external indexes. Very shady stuff, Kagi. I'd go as far as to say they are now lying by omission.
Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, and other APIs.
Then it goes on to say:
Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic.
Now reading between the lines, and more importantly knowing how much sheer capital goes into indexing the entire web, I can say with much certainty that Kagi is probably powered mostly by Google since it and Bing (which they aren't using) are basically the only meaningful players in the space. Yandex is for the Russosphere, and Mojeek is nice but nowhere even close to Google or Bing's coverage. By their own admission Teclis is more narrowly focused and not meant to replace Google's index. So I'm going to go ahead and call them big fat liars.
I wouldn't even care that Google is their main index, that's fine and they can't be expected to compete with the billions of dollars Google spends on indexing. But the lack of transparency and shady business practices are a big turn-off for me.
Who is going to keep them accountable? Trees have a record high abstention rate, and if these representatives are elected by humans that's just proportional voting with veneer on top.
Democracy is about balancing levers, and that's why there is more than one branch of government. Special interest groups do have power, and so does the judiciary (who may sue the government for unlawful cutting down of trees) and the executive (who may have power to declare certain government-owned land to be Protected).
The real ecologist move would be to write a duty to protect the environment into the constitution, so that the judiciary can strike down any law that does anything to the contrary.
If I saw that in someone's house I'd think "well that's terrible but no-one's first woodworking project looks great, at least it's creative problem-solving".
Hearing the price tag is where I'd probably faint.
President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law....
I think it'd be interesting to look at a worldwide map of lead pipes. Not that such a map can even necessarily exist; here in Liège, BE, the director of the water distribution company got fired a couple years ago for severely underreporting the amount of lead pipes left in the network. I can personally attest that lead pipes are still common in the nearby housing.
Lead pipes, like asbestos, were used so liberally that they are basically impossible to fully get rid of without spending a very significant portion of the GDP on it. So we just wait until we have to fully rebuild the street to replace the pipes.
Or an EU country. We've got a whole separate defense union. Historically it hasn't mattered too much since almost all the EU is in NATO, but with Trump looking actually re-electable that's a whole separate alliance he can't directly interfere with.
You live in a very unrepresentative bubble if you think the boycotts have anything to do with this. It's a fringe movement at best, and if it's going to have an impact it will be from richer consumers who can better afford to choose their spending habits.
It's wages not keeping up with inflation levels not seen in the West since the '80s. Simple as.
Servants? That's bourgeois-adjacent (/s). The reality is 80 % of people used to be farmers until the industrial revolution, so if we want to undo AuTOmAtiOn, in all likelihood your ass is either going to be wielding a hoe all day long or if you're lucky you'll be hand-spinning loom. Or to be even more pendantic, we'll be starving to death because pre-industrial and pre-fertilizer agriculture cannot possibly provide enough calories for the current world population by a very long shot.
Or maybe the wannabe communists in this thread should remember that Marxism is about the value of labor and (this is where communists disagree very hard on the specifics) distributed capital so that advances in (e.g.) automation benefit the many instead of the few. The idea that "communism = no need to work anymore" is some new-age bullshit perpetuated by an illiterate disillusionment with capitalism coupled to a very incorrect perception that we live in (or close to) a post-scarcity world and the related tech-bro propaganda that "AI is going to replace us all" (it's not, not in its current form nor the one after that, but it makes for a nice narrative to pitch to venture capital investors).
You expect us to not notice how you skipped over the entire 0-50 range there? "It's just better for everyday temps" my ass.
Also 100F is not deadly if you got water and aren't working hard, and neither is 0F if you got appropriate clothing.
And don't get me started on how y'all pretend that measuring temperature has to be on this stupid ass scale "because it goes to a hundred where I live" but then y'all count your school grades (which are entieely made up and would cost literally nothing to change) to 3.8 or whatever the fuck.
what an understatement. it's very unsexy but also incredibly effective. if your house is over 20 years old, you don't need fancy-ass blinds, you need to get your house insulated ASAP. everything else must wait.
insulation is the number one most effective thing anyone can do to improve the energy use of their living space. only when your house is properly insulated can you think of shade management, greenery, passive ventilation, heat pumps, etc. in an insulated house, those either won't work at all or will be wildly inefficient.
If 100 % of Indians start using English as their lingua franca (they're on a track to just that), does that make Hindi a dialect of English?
The sociopolitical reality of a lingua franca does not define the scientific linguistic reality of other languages.
I will say that personally the notion of catalan being a subset of castellan sounds ridiculous on account of the fact that in its written form catalan is roughly mutually intelligible with french, where castellan is not. If it's going to be lumped in as a dialect of something, it'd be more intellectually honest to make it a dialect of French.
FOSS and paid are not mutually exclusive, but Kagi is not FOSS and of dubious transparency/trustworthiness.
Also Kagi is not operating a search engine, but a search aggregator mostly dependent on Google. They don't need much upfront capital to operate.
An actual search indexer competitive with Google is too expensive to be profitable without (tens of) millions of paid users or hundreds of millions of free ones (i.e. bing and maaaaybe yandex?).
True google alternatives are therefore only going to come out of big capital (MSFT), or less likely a government (EU?) funded company. There might be an argument to be made for decentralized search as well, but the only actual contender in that field right now is a crypto thing that probably relies mostly on bing/google. Still, a decentralized open indexer may actually make some sense in theory.
Google's slow demise is entirely expected late-stage enshittification.
What is frustrating is that search is mostly a solved problem. Crawling and indexing are solved problems. Fighting adversarial SEO is a continuous task, that Google Search is essentially refusing to perform but is clearly cheap enough for an upstart like Kagi to do reasonably well (their only added-value is the aggregation and filtering of other indexers such as google and mojeek, and let's be honest it's probably 99% google's index powering Kagi).
This shows that the lack of meaningful competition in the space is actually merely a matter of capital. There are too many webpages to scrape, process, and save and nothing short of "indexing almost as much stuff as google" is going to cut it.
In the software world we're used to seeing FOSS alternatives to most things, because software's capital costs are typically almost equal to manpower costs. However for search this doesn't work, just like it historically hasn't worked too well for some really expensive software (such as audiovisual creation tools, with the notable exceptions of Blender and to a lesser extent Krita).
There should be a well-funded non-profit building and providing a high-quality, exhaustive, transparent and open-source indexing service for the world. It definitely sounds possible, and even rather easy in the grand scheme of things. Yet current economic incentives do not favor such models. However I do wonder if there are not options to be explored, such as distributed crawlers or even a distributed index (after looking it up, YaCy seems to be doing just that though at a glance it seems, uh, old and clunky). Or maybe the EU should finally put a real focus on meaningfully funding indigenous FOSS R&D so the enshittification process of American tech giants doesn't crush us as well.
A 56-year-old Snohomish man had set his Tesla Model S on Autopilot and was looking at his cellphone on Friday when he struck and killed a motorcyclist in front of him in Monroe, court records show....
No matter how they're marketed and used, self-driving systems will make people less engaged (that's the entire point, people don't use it out of arm fatigue, they use it because it's mentally relaxing!) and therefore more distracted.
"The driver should keep their full attention on the road and be prepared to take over at any point" is an impossible standard and a lame-ass loophole that shouldn't even be allowed to be cited in a court of law. Fully engaged drivers do not ask an "autopilot" to steer for them.
It's way worse, it's a handful of (less than 10 IIRC) cents of monopoly money for watching over an hour's content.
There is truly no value proposition whatsoever as literally any kind of even terribly sub-minimum wage work would be more lucrative, yet it apparently appeals to (typically) students with zero income.
It's cyberpunk dystopia except instead of cool cyber-implants you get a lame rectangle-shaped dopamine pump that also gives you crippling depression.
Given that there are plenty of developed countries where credit scores don't exist (and plenty more where they do but only for businesses), I think alternatives are imaginable. I would know, I live in one such country.
If you want a mortgage here, the bank will:
Ask you about your current loans and potential past defaults
Ask you about your current and past income, marital status, employment status, etc.
Use those variables to pretty straightforwardly determine your loan capacity
I think do a background check in national databases for defaults/"bad payer" status
Contractually obligate you to receive your salary on the same account from which they will automatically pull the mortgage. I don't think this helps reduce actual defaults much, but it probably greatly reduces the financial and administrative overhead of late/missed payments. Also this ties you into the creditor bank which is good for business, IDK how standard that practice is abroad.
The US consumer economy is very highly dependent on short-term/credit debt, and that is absolutely crazy to me. Some Americans say they "need" a credit card to defer payment on some purchases, and as someone raised in culture where debit is king this sounds absolutely insane. Y'all have been propagandized, here it is perfectly normal to not have a single credit line open before shopping for a mortgage and if anything your banker will commend you for it.
Why do northern francophones always get forgotten in these histories :(
There's at least 5 million of us in Belgium and (typically northern) France who celebrate Saint-Nicolas every year on the 6th.
Also I will clarify because sometimes this gets lost in the explanation, but round these parts Saint Nicholas and Santa are both celebrated as two distinct entities, on the 6th and 24th/25th respectively.
You're choosing to interpret "300 % efficient" under the very narrow definition used in thermodynamics.
Then you acknowledge that it is "more energy efficient" than a (almost) 100 % (thermodynamically) efficient furnace, completely contradicting yourself. Pick a lane and take a breath, outside of academic contexts people will "misuse" technical terms (such as equating COP to efficiency) and it does not matter one bit because it is very clear contextually what they mean.
"Color terminal" isn't a thing. Applications can choose to output ANSI escape codes which most terminal emulators will render as color changes. Whether and which colors get used depends on the value of $TERM, which informs the application of the capabilities of the terminal emulator.
So if your remote servers don't have color, either $TERM isn't being set or its value is unknown to the server. Most modern terminal emulators support at least the same escape codes as xterm-256color though so you can always try to export that.
Every other "cyperbunk dystopia" out there be pretending that capitalists would make you pay for every breath you take.
That's a hella dumb take when subscriptions exist. I wish I could actually pay-by-the-breath when the reality is the best value is 5 % off quarterly payments for a million breath bundle (unused breaths non-refundable, subscription only cancelable upon giving up your firstborn, and completely unrelaredly Breathe-Easy™ just dished out a record $10 trillion in dividends to Elon Musk).
I've heard that was more of a European thing, but the only two serious contenders are Pozidriv vs Torx for screws (and hex vs Allen for bolts).
I just checked my local hardware store's website, and out of the 176 kinds of 4/4.5mm screw boxes in their inventory, 74 are Torx, 55 are Pozidriv, and 38 are Phillips (ew).
Either Torx or Pozidriv is fine when used properly, however most DIYers don't understand the difference between PZ and PH and end up stripping their heads. Also it's much harder to use the wrong-sized bit with Torx than PZ.
So yeah, Torx wins in just about every category and other heads only get manufactured to appease old people and penny-pinchers.
For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. government is changing how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity, an effort that federal officials believe will more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage....
Because we have a different history than the US. Last time we had a Big Ethnic Event™ some motherfuckers wearing Hugo Boss came in and went through every bit of census information we had to commit genocide against people that are otherwise indistinguishable from the general population.
Also positive discrimination is viewed, even by some progressives, as "bad" as in "on a philosophical level I think it's wrong" (I this is largely due to the stronger influence of Humanism and much lower penetration of CRT). I have to stress, this is not a matter of whether positive discrimination works, it's a matter of philosophy.
So with THAT in mind it's not hard to see why Europeans are culturally very put off with America's approach of putting everyone in labelled boxes. There's still a debate being had about CRT, but I think everyone agrees that the state MUST NOT have an "ethnic database".
The one country I know does this is Germany. My experience is centered around Belgium/France, where the catholic church holds baptism records but does not share them with the government (and neither would the government even be allowed to ask in the first place AFAIK). As for ethnic categorization, I don't know of a country which does that.
I see. So your government has literally no knowledge whatsoever about the Roma for example?
There's no registry of them no. We discriminate the old-fashioned way, such as by outlawing camping outside of certain areas which indirectly targets their way of life.
I also didn't say that Germans aren't European, but if all you can find on religious/ethnic state cataloguing in Europe is Germany and Finland doing some funky tax things, I think that only strengthens my point that we are VERY far from the US's "please tell us your exact skin tone for, uh, statistics" approach. Europe is not a monolith but my goal was to show a different perspective, which I believe I have achieved and I don't know why that offends you so much.
EDIT: I guess I could have been more clear in my first comment, but it's pretty obvious to me that I don't claim to speak for ALL of Europe since literally nobody can. I further clarified that my experience is that of someone raised in a Franco-Belgian culture but that I believe that it applies further in Europe, which I don't think is as broad or incorrect of a claim as your make it to be.
They already are! Some young artists are already doing those 2000s nostalgia CD releases for the kicks of having a physical medium.
However a big part of the marketing for vinyl has historically been "the sound is warm/high definition/whatever audiophile bullshit". Anyone can achieve the same "warmth" with an EQ and some crackle/white noise (it works so well it's a whole genre called lofi...), but the "vinyl sounds better" crowd will make the unfalsifiable claim that "it's not the same".
However, good luck claiming that "CDs sound different from FLACs"!
In the end both vinyl and CD enjoyers are doing the same thing: enjoying music through personal and ritualistic manipulation of physical objects, that also come with nice album art. It's just that some vinyl enjoyers are attributing some of that enjoyment to a largely made-up supposed "superiority" of sound (yes there are edge cases like "bad" remasters of songs originally released on vinyl, but is that really why anyone buys a turntable? Be honest.).
Now you're just reaching at straws to comfort your worldview. I could explain to you that I never was a huge gamer (and only started spending significant time gaming around 12 y/o), and that I am hugely uncreative (in the traditional sense at least) despite having played with dolls as a child. But I get the feeling that you'll just come up with more explanations why I somehow unconsciously "trained" the things I'm naturally good at.
Anything to avoid facing the fact that brains, like bodies, aren't all created equal and identical. To pretend they are is completely ridiculous. Yet we do so because admitting that not everyone is born with equal potential breaks through the veil of The Meritocracy™, Karma™ and all the other little lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing the fact that the world is fundamentally unjust.
Severe flooding wreaks havoc across northern Europe ( www.euronews.com )
Severe flooding caused by heavy rainfall has inundated Voeren and Liège in Belgium, as well as parts of France and Germany....
Teens charged with vehicle theft, criminal mischief after attempting to run away from wilderness therapy program - KRBD ( www.krbd.org )
Closest subway line from you, France ( jlai.lu )
'Massive' French police deployment arrives to fight liberation forces in the colony in New Caledonia ( www.euractiv.com )
xkcd #2933: Elementary Physics Paths ( imgs.xkcd.com )
https://xkcd.com/2933...
Report: Microsoft to face antitrust case over Teams ( arstechnica.com )
We may never know ( lemmy.world )
A new trolley era ( lemmy.world )
Do they still do this? ( sh.itjust.works )
Emoji Rule ( files.catbox.moe )
Donald Trump says he'll revoke Joe Biden's protections for trans people 'on day one' ( www.advocate.com )
Microsoft wipes out evidence of real ads in Windows 11 Start menu ( www.xda-developers.com )
GIMP 2.10.38 Released with Much-Requested Backports of GTK3 Features ( 9to5linux.com )
Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website
Hi!...
Anon has nerdy hobbies ( sh.itjust.works )
UK surgeon who described Gaza ‘massacre’ denied entry to France ( www.theguardian.com )
A London surgeon who has provided testimony over the current war in Gaza after operating during the conflict has been denied entry to France, where he was due to speak in the French senate later on Saturday....
Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change ( aftermath.site )
Imagine denying other living and breathing lifeforms agency to thrive and change lol lol lol ( mander.xyz )
Fun facts: the UK has crazy laws protecting trees and hedgerows. There's a national tree registry for old boys.
Found this great deal on a new chair for my living room. Almost 50% off! ( lemmy.world )
Biden unveils $3 billion for nationwide lead pipe replacement ( www.cnn.com )
President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law....
The Belarusian authorities are preparing children for war with EU countries ( texty.org.ua )
Starbucks shares sink 12% as coffee chain slashes 2024 forecast amid same-store sales drag ( www.cnbc.com )
Shares of the company fell 12% in extended trading....
Life doesnt have to be this way ( lemmy.world )
Good night's sleep rule ( sh.itjust.works )
The more air conditioners in an area the hotter becomes around it. In turn increasing the demand for AC. Infinite money glitch.
language rule ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
It was so bright and helpful ( lemmy.world )
A web search tip to avoid AI generated SEO junk ( lemmy.world )
Tesla driver was using Autopilot before fatal Monroe crash, police say ( www.seattletimes.com )
A 56-year-old Snohomish man had set his Tesla Model S on Autopilot and was looking at his cellphone on Friday when he struck and killed a motorcyclist in front of him in Monroe, court records show....
EU sets TikTok ultimatum over 'addictive' new app feature ( www.dw.com )
The European Commission is threatening to suspend the TikTok Lite rewards programme, unless the Chinese-owned app provides answers within 24 hours....
Americans be like ( lemmy.ml )
Same color as them too ( lemmy.world )
The efficiency is bonkers ( lemmy.dbzer0.com )
Alt text:...
18 April 1987 ( sh.itjust.works )
Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color ( www.theregister.com )
Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls, Sign in or ... ( lemmy.ml )
https://tech.lgbt/@david/112277792072629510...
cognitive behavioral torture ( i.imgur.com )
acceptable screws ( sopuli.xyz )
Plants VS Rule ( lemmy.blahaj.zone )
US changes how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity. It's the first revision in 27 years ( apnews.com )
For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. government is changing how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity, an effort that federal officials believe will more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage....
Vinyl records outsell CDs for the second year running ( www.theverge.com )
Worst day ( lemm.ee )