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Cake day: January 16th, 2026

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  • French75@slrpnk.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlApolitical
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    1 day ago

    Most Americans don’t understand the distinction between partisanship and politics. The phrase “I’m just not political” usually means either “I don’t want to hear your partisan bullshit right now.” or “I hold objectionable views that I can’t articulately defend.”






  • The APU and taxi rules would likely help a lot, but would likely require a lot of change to infrastructure and airline and ATC SOPs. The electrification bit is beginning to happen where it makes sense, but that part will likely be slow to make a difference, and a small difference at that.

    I agree that having transportation alternatives like rail could help reduce demand for commercial air transport, but we would be a generation away from useful intrastate rail service if we were serious about building it now, which we’re not. So there’s no good reason to not do these things while we faff about on “high speed” rail.


  • Yeah, that’s been true for a while. I have a Tesla model 3 and it’s the first American car I’ve bought in 30 years. If it weren’t for the surveillance capitalism, I’d say it’s an an exceptional car.

    The whole car world has changed though. Honda used to be great, but they’re kinda shit now. Toyota and Lexus are still pretty great for long term reliability. Comfort is great, but driving dynamics are mid. BMW and Mercedes (some of them anyway) drive very nice, but you don’t want to own them out of warranty. Most American cars are somewhere in the middle. They’ve improved a lot since the 80s and 90s, but so has everything else.


  • Encrypted apps like Signal encrypt messages in a way that only you and the recipient can decrypt and read. Not even Signal can decrypt them. However it has always been the case that another person could look over your shoulder and read the messages you send, who you’re sending them to, and so on. Pretty obvious, right?

    What the author and Signal are calling out here is that all major commercial OSes are now building in features that “look over your shoulder.” But it’s worse than that because they also record every other device sensor’s data.

    Windows Recall is the easiest to understand. It is a tool build into windows (and enabled by default) that takes a screenshot a few times per second. This effectively capture a stream of everything you do while using windows; what you browse, who you chat with, the pron you watch, the games you play, where you travel, and who you travel with or near. If you use “private” message tools like Signal, they’ll be able to see who you are messaging and read the conversations, just as if they were looking over your shoulder, permanently.

    They claim that for an AI agent to serve you well, it needs to know everything it can about you. They also make dubious claims that they’ll never use any of this against you, but they also acknowledge that they comply with court orders and government requests (to varying degrees). So… if you trust all of these companies and every government in the world, there’s nothing to worry about.





  • We’re rat-holing a bit here. Yes, tech can always be better, but those attributes aren’t what’s slowing down EV sales. The Model 3 became the best selling car in the USA despite those characteristics.

    Sales are declining for other reasons. My suggestion here is that one of the most obvious reasons sales may be declining is that it’s a lot more expensive to “fuel” an EV than it was just a few years ago. Utility prices and NEM policies have driven op costs a ton.


  • You would think, but the policy moves the state has made, between mandating rooftop solar on new homes, and new net energy metering billing policies have inverted the finances of EVs. They are more expensive to buy, and often more expensive to operate than gas engine vehicles because we have completely fucked electricity prices. We are 3-4x the national average per KWh, and and easily double (if not more) what it costs in other states to install rooftop solar.

    Our electricity prices have more than doubled in the last 5 years, and the cost of rooftop solar has balooned even independent of the batter requirement for new rooftop installations.

    The issue is massive pricing disincentives for EVs at a time when gas prices are decreasing.


  • Ah, yeah, I missed that you referred to America. We do have it pretty good here in CA, and my use case is favorable for an EV. I’m able to charge at home, and rarely need to charge en route to get somewhere. Those few occasions when I do, the 10 mins to charge up isn’t a big deal. If I couldn’t charge at home, or regularly took very long trips, the EV wouldn’t make sense.

    As for the weight… I just looked and my EV (a model 3) is 50 pounds heavier than my other car (a Lexus hybird sedan). That’s a pretty negligible difference. It’s about 500 pounds heavier than the Honda accord I used to have. That’s a more material difference, but not as big a deal as people online make it out to be.





  • Fully agree that the DE doesn’t matter much. I’ve used KDE and XFCE the most over the years, and cinnamon, gnome, and even enlightenment a bit over the years. I was never a big fan of gnome, however I recently got a 2in1 laptop, and after a few days of tinkering… I think gnome is a bit better for that kind of interaction than than the others.

    There are things to like and dislike with all of them I’d say.