It’s not a bad idea to have energy production near where the energy is being used.

That said, it’s not an either or.

Technology Connections actually did a great video on why using solar panels in place of crops can benefit the crops and actually provides more energy than the crops themselves. At least in the U.S., a huge portion of our crops are used for ethanol in gasoline anyway.

Not a lot you can do with phones unfortunately. You could set them up as basic fileservers using CopyParty or Syncthing. Don’t use it for anything critical - these are not backup solutions.

Set up Tailscale to access it outside your network.

I’ve been told that government auctions canbe a good source for cheap used PCs but I never had much luck there. I suspect that they get snatched up quickly and stripped for parts. Try eBay or Mercari?

We should ask Claude how to solve this. /s

Apparently after this he also hit some locals on their fists with his face. I hope the seal and their fists are okay.

I follow more than I have time to listen to. Here are a few:

Stuff You Should Know

Hidden Brain

Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me

This American Life

I thought they charged by sitting on powerlines?

Oh, yeah. This is a good point. A lot of things require their own apps to do now and quick installation is not always easy. I’ve had issues that were solvable but required some effort like this. Some friends invited me to a scavenger hunt and it took a while to get the app working (another friend on iOS couldn’t get it working either, so probably not a great design). Every parking lot wants a different app these days, which can be a pain.

Event ticketing, work apps, etc may take a little longer than normal to find, install, and get working. Not like you can explain in a group setting, “ackshully, my phone isn’t working because its BETTER.”

I’ve just set it up about a month ago. Some apps work fully and some only halfway. I think it has to do with some kind of authentication that Android is doing. So CoMaps only works for turn by turn, but they have said if it is installed from the Play Store, then it will work fully. Sandboxed Google Maps works seamlessly.

Audio apps play in the mini player, including basic controls (play/pause, skip, etc.), but I get a crash anytime I try to launch one on the car’s fullscreen console.

As I said, I’ve just set it up and haven’t tinkered with it yet; it could be user error still.

My banking apps mostly work, but with some functionally problems. I can’t get Zelle to work or CashApp, so quick payments and transfers are problematic.

Yeah… totally normal that a new technology has to be shoehorned into the workforce. I’m sure they only need to enforce its adoption because it is so useful.

I was using CLI exclusively for a year or so, but recently added DockMon and it’s helped with updates and at-a-glance management.

Yeah, it basically says, “researchers could potentially measure vibrations in the air to detect speech.”

I know. That’s how speech works.

What a thoughtful reply from a dev after a detailed, cogent description of tensions and bottlenecks in the ux of the platform they are building.

Interesting, so even you have no way to know whether I was one of the downvotes on this comment?

To expand on standards of transparency in moderation decisions:

Lemmy was built with a public moderation log by design. The ethos of the platform includes accountability through transparency. Every action is recorded and preserved (short of defederation or instance shutdown).

This makes moderation auditable. Mods literally cannot do (much) shady stuff in secret. In essence, moderation policy is discernable from the logs. That’s part of why well-run communities have the rules clearly defined and mods follow their written policy.

If a community/instance wants to make political alignment a moderation offense, they’re free to do so. Many communities/instances are quite explicit about this. If a community wants to make moderation completely arbitrary, they are free to do so. That is somewhat less common, but also not unheard of.

In truth, any community can be designed and moderated in any way whatsoever that the mod chooses.

However, the success of a community depends on the quality of the content and the quality of the moderation. Good content brings people in, but bad moderation drives people out. When the moderation is unfair, it is bad for the health of the community, and ultimately bad for the health of the platform.

It is my experience that transparent moderation, such as announcing changes in policy, techniques, etc., is less work in the long run. It takes a bit of time and attention to roll out changes when they are open for community feedback, but that feedback will come in one way or another. If mods don’t provide a formal outlet, then users will make one. Mods operating opaquely give up their right to have the conversation on their time and terms. They also miss out on the wisdom of the crowd. I’ve been in many situations where community feedback provided a valuable insight or tool to face an obstacle through open discussion about policy.

All that being said, one of the major obstacles to growth of the Threadiverse is the woeful dearth of moderation tools. It’s extremely time intensive to do basic things like identifying alt accounts, vote manipulation, bot behavior etc. It is also subject to a lot of human error. This makes it discouraging for people to moderate. I have heard about tools that use AI to detect CP content and remove it quickly, which I think we can all agree is a good use of the tech. Tools like this are not built into the platform, but cobbled together by volunteer mods and admins to keep the platform safe, legal, and sustainable. If they were built in, then moderation would be far easier (and therefore likely better).

I don’t like this happening, and there should be transparency in all moderation decisions, but some of these points make no sense.

There is essentially no expectation of privacy on threadiverse platforms. Everything is public and probably already being used to train models.

There is no private messaging system. Direct messages are unencrypted and potentially visible to any instance admins. They and should not be used to share anything sensitive.

I think sometimes we forget that citizenship in ancient Greece was reserved for wealthy bloodline males who owned land and slaves, and were able-bodied and politically unproblematic.

Sure, Greek democracy was an important first step, but it was functionally just an expansion of the aristocracy. Let’s not romanticize it overmuch.

Thanks, this ended up being a good fit for me, too

The 3-letter agencies are definitely on here, but it’s unlikely they will do anything. It’s more useful to keep watch

I’ve reported a lot of obvious (but not overt) neonazi content on meta and it almost never gets taken down. Maaaaybe 5% on the high end. It has to be extremely overt to register. Obvious dog whistles like “the Austrian leader was right,” using emojis like 👃, or 🧃 to make hate speech against Jews, 🐵 for African Americans, etc. slides right by.