asoneth

> aren’t you effectively expanding the size of the language, even if this is “implicit”?

Yes, this is how Toki Pona dictionaries work. For example, there is a surprisingly thick two-way English - Toki Pona dictionary, "ku", which includes more than 11k entries such as "tomo tawa" for "car" or "ilo kalama" for a radio. See https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51n8JCdFlQL.jpg or other images from https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978292367/

Note that as it is descriptive rather than proscriptive, each translation has a superscript indicating what fraction of English-speaking Toki Pona speakers used that particular translation when the book was written. I don't have my copy on hand but I recall that there was a community survey and Sonia Lang used some kind of scale such as 4 for a universally accepted meaning down to 1 or 1/2 as a highly idiosyncratic/fanciful translation only used by a small number of people.

I suspect if the language evolves some people may compress these further so that "tomo tawa" becomes "tomo-tawa" becomes "tomotawa" which may help with parsing written text. Perhaps fluent speakers do not have this problem, but I typically have to read a sentence more than once to parse it correctly.

> the quality of search results is often terrible

Having used a few, I agree there's room for improvement.

> the assumption that complexity of layout and density of information, much less relevance, are mutual opposites isn't valid

I agree, but has anyone claimed that there is a correlation between a page's complexity and the quality of its information?

My experience has been that the folks who willingly disable javascript, use niche minimalist search engines and browsers, or otherwise prioritize a minimal ("smol") web experience are acutely aware that they are making a tradeoff. They sacrifice access to a significant fraction of the overall web including many high quality pages in exchange for a user experience they prefer.

Like many who have tried it, I found the experience too limiting, but I appreciate what they're doing. If nothing else, their efforts are making the web better for people who rely on accessibility technology and are forced to make such tradeoffs.

No site is an island. Even if I keep my own website's implementation minimal I still end up interacting with the rest of the internet via web pages with less minimal markup.

However, if you also had a like-minded community of similarly minimal websites, a mechanism to minify websites, search engines that prioritized minimal (or minifiable) websites, and a social convention of avoiding linking to any website unless it was minimal (or minifiable) then you'd end up with something like the Gemini community.

In fact, I suspect something like that will supplant Gemini in practice. Browsers already have reader modes and some search engines allow you to block certain domains. I could easily imagine search engines or browsers providing greater end-user control over this sort of thing in the future.

> The fact that you don’t like the specific rules for e-bikes doesn’t make them a “gray area”.

My understanding is that the rules in NYC governing e-bikes and electric mopeds were very fuzzy until around 2020, but there is still some uncertainty.

Before 2020 most of the delivery "e-bikes" ridden in NYC were technically illegal and were subject to occasional/erratic police enforcement such as stings and seizures despite being about as ubiquitous as taxi cabs. This was controversial when I lived there.

I no longer live in NYC but since then my understanding is that the city and state governments have worked with delivery riders to clarify the legal status of their vehicles but there is still a bit of "gray area" in practice.

A pet peeve of mine is the lack of clarity over terminology has resulted in journalists and marketers branding electric mopeds and motorcycles as "e-bikes".

On one end of the spectrum are regular-looking pedal bicycles with assistive motors that cut out at 20 mph and weigh around 40 pounds. On the other end of the spectrum are electric mopeds, motorcycles, and dirt bikes (some street legal, some not) with fat tires and vestigial or removed pedals that can reach 35+ mph and can weigh 200+ pounds. Both have valid use cases and both can be ridden well or poorly, but they are qualitatively different vehicles in terms of weight, power, riding style, and safety risks.

The fact that both of these vehicle types are often simply referred to as "e-bikes" without specifying their class makes discussions more difficult than necessary.

Edit: Electrek is particularly egregious about this, referring to anything with a battery and pedals as an "electric bike" or "e-bike", for example:

https://electrek.co/2023/07/18/british-soldiers-electric-bik...

https://electrek.co/2023/04/13/eunorau-flash-launched-as-220...

https://electrek.co/2023/05/28/wau-project-cyber-cryptically...

https://electrek.co/2023/07/07/police-crackdown-on-illegally...

> ride your e-bike/bike in the middle of the lane. That is legal in the state were I live and probably most other states.

This is dependent on where you live, and I would not recommend taking the lane unless you observe local cyclists doing so as well. I've ridden across several states and in some parts of the US the rules of the road are dictated by Newton's laws rather than state and federal ones. You may be within your legal rights to ride in the middle of the lane, but depending where you ride you may have to deal with more than just everyday honking and swearing. Punishment passes, thrown aluminum cans (hopefully empty), brake checks, swerving, etc.

> Maybe that's a good thing, I am not sure.

If you are young or if you are old with eyestrain issues it may be worth your while to learn about things like bias lighting, blue filters, PWM dimming, etc.

If you are old with good vision then I guess just keep doing what works :)

Many folks in my office have an ancillary monitor or two to the side of their main monitors, often in portrait mode, just for keeping docs, diagrams, and other reference material. But having so many backlit monitors in your field of view can become a little fatiguing.

An e-ink display with sharp text and without a backlight could be useful for such a use case.

But agreed that mobile contexts seem more broadly useful.

That makes sense to me. If you have a specific use for each workspace then I see how reordering them willy-nilly would be problematic and break muscle memory.

I have a multi-monitor setup and I often find myself using particular monitors for particular applications. I would be annoyed if the operating system decided to start reorganizing them.

> 'zoom' is not equivalent to maximization

Interesting, I tried a few windows that I don't normally "zoom" and you are right. I suppose prior to this I only ever attempted to perform this action on browser/document/messaging/media windows that are able to be fully maximized.

> there's a big, stupid, slow animation that must play every time you switch between workspaces

I wondered how I never noticed this, and it looks like I had Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion enabled.

> you cannot float windows from other applications over a fullscreen window

Agreed, I found it handy the first time I discovered I could move a floating window over a maximized window in Windows, but I've also noticed that I let my windows become a lot more disorganized when I'm using Windows. I'm not saying they're related, it may be that I just don't have enough Windows experience, but I do find that I end up keeping my workspace a bit tidier on macOS or a tiling WM.

Personally I find switching between workspaces annoying, but not particularly more or less annoying than switching between maximized windows on Windows. So I am curious what you specifically find annoying about treating maximized windows as workspaces.

(Also, note that you can hold the Option key and click on the green plus in the upper-left corner you will get the standard Windows maximize behavior, which macOS calls "Zoom". Even better, you can go to System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Double click a window's title bar to... and select "Zoom" to make this action even easier.)

I cannot overstate how difficult it is to do this solo. Being the only person in a friend group who does not have a phone results in pretty severe ostracization, especially for preteens and teens who do not yet have a strong sense of self. It means being left out of conversations, invitations, discussions, jokes, parties, homework questions, etc.

Having said that, you are early enough that you still have time to convince the other parents in their grade cohort to take a pledge like "Wait Until 8th" https://www.waituntil8th.org/ (In the US, 8th grade is 13-14 years old.) This provides a kind of "herd immunity" as long as you get enough families on board.

And if your school does not already have them in place you can advocate for anti-cell-phone policies which minimize classroom time as a potential vector.

Be forewarned that you may not be successful unless you are also willing to cut social ties with families who cave in and give their kids phones before then.

Several years ago we left NYC for a small old New England town not far from where I grew up. Our neighbors have victory gardens, chickens, goats, bees, and/or fruit trees. We insulated our home, got solar panels, started a garden and a cellar, and built up a backlog of firewood. We eat more fresh local food and spend more time working outside, building relationships with neighbors, and working on community projects.

I still pay attention to global events, vote, minimize my "carbon footprint", march, and all the stuff that feels morally necessary. But when that's all I was doing I felt pessimistic because I felt like none that actually made a dent in the world's problems. Since then I've found it more useful to focus attention on local problems. For example, hosting refugees, helping at the food bank, teaching repair or technology classes, supporting locally-owned farms and businesses, motivating friends and neighbors to get around town by foot or bike, advocating for low-income housing in your neighborhood, that sort of thing.

Climate change will not end civilization. But it'll cause a lot of misery. So if you're already fulfilling whatever moral obligation you feel you need to do at the global level then maybe consider finding a resilient community, putting down roots, and figuring out what you can do to help your neighbors.

Absolutely. More efficient technologies will make life more pleasant for many people. On balance I think this is a net win for humanity and am in favor of ongoing work in this area.

However, I should have been more specific when I said making air conditioning more efficient is counterproductive. I solely meant counterproductive towards the assumed goal of decarbonization in response to the prior comment's claim that "finding efficient ways to use our energy" is a viable strategy to address climate change.

Without pairing that efficiency with real solutions like putting a price on negative externalities, increasing efficiency is significantly more likely to increase overall energy consumption than to decrease it.

Due to the Jevons paradox making air conditioning more efficient will most likely increase energy consumption.

Whereas if you increase the price of energy (e.g. carbon fees) then you will reduce consumption and incentivize more efficient air conditioning as a side effect.

Unfortunately while the former is counterproductive the latter is politically unpalatable so we'll end up either doing nothing or making the problem worse.

> it is obviously more sustainable to upgrade versions every N years

I've heard this kind of thing before, but it's worth considering that utility, government, and infrastructure software may be under different kinds of constraints than what you're used to.

Testing field upgrades takes years and the rollout often takes a year or more. There are hundreds of different teams involved and every one of them wants to ensure they don't miss the thing that bricks a submarine, satellite, transmission line, or IRS portal. If you can do this half or a quarter as often you can save taxpayers tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

And in a surprising number of cases the software is never upgraded for the ~25 year or so lifetime of the hardware because the cost of the upgrade is comparable to the cost of buying new hardware. Sometimes that means some poor development team backports security patches for antique versions of DOS or Unix, but in more cases than you'd think they just airgap the computers and hope for the best.

> A car passing another at exactly 55mph while another car is going the same speed will take forever.

Why would either driver would try to pass the other if they are going the same speed? If they're not passing then they should move to the right out of courtesy. (And they're legally required to in some states.)

> The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.

If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely. Whereas if the truck driver is traveling near the speed limit then the line of people "trapped for hours" are also moving near speed limit which seems fine. Plus, drivers of slower vehicles (trucks, RVs, farm equipment) are often courteous and pull over occasionally to let other drivers pass.

So that leaves cases where someone is driving a bit under the speed limit and is unwilling or unable to move to the side to let others pass. I don't begrudge someone breaking the limit by ~5mph to pass in such a case, but I also don't mind being "trapped" behind someone who scrupulously obeys every single traffic law even if it slows my journey by a few minutes. That would certainly be preferable to the unsafe behavior I see out on the roadways on a daily basis.

> Sure the passing driver is ultimately at fault, but the slow driver has blood on their hands despite no accountability.

If the slow driver is on a highway with a minimum speed limit or they're performing other unsafe maneuvers like weaving between lanes or stopping abruptly then they're clearly not a safe driver, so I agree that slow does not always equal safe.

But otherwise the collision is both morally and legally 100% the fault of the passing driver. Drivers have no moral or legal right to always operate at the speed limit if it's not safe to do so.

My semi-rural town has very narrow roads and I regularly encounter utility vehicles, school busses, farm vehicles, and cyclists on the roadway, not to mention turkeys, deer, and turtles. If a passing driver caused an accident or was pulled over and they tried to argue to the police officer that the slower vehicle "provoked them" into passing dangerously I can't imagine anyone finding that a compelling argument.

Determining whether a particular driver is driving properly seems overkill. Any correlation between driving behavior and insurance payouts seems like it would be sufficient to improve the accuracy of your risk scores.

Let's say you only analyze vehicle speed data. That is clearly insufficient for training self-driving.

But it is very likely there is some correlation between speed and insurance payouts. For example, say you are able to segment your customer base including one subset with drivers who typically drive >80 miles an hour and another subset with drivers who typically drive <55 miles per hour. Are you saying that you would predict that the two populations have identical risk profiles? That speed data has no correlation with risk?

I have no idea whether the current telematics algorithms are any good at assessing risk.

However, with a large enough corpus of training data including years of telematics on drivers with and without insurance claims it certainly seems like it should be possible to build models that can make much more accurate risk assessments than they can with the data they currently collect such as age, zipcode, and past accidents.

Put another way, I would be surprised if there was zero correlation between driving behavior and insurance claims.

That seems like... a good outcome? The privacy implications troubling enough to give me pause but the idea of more people actually driving at safe and legal speeds seems like a net positive, but perhaps there's some disaster scenario I'm not considering?

I am also skeptical of the accuracy of the initial rules but this seems like a domain that should be fairly easy to refine with a large enough corpus of data. Once an insurance company has a sufficient number of claims from telematics users I would wager that they will be able to find strong signals in the telematics data to identify customers who are likely to be expensive.

I've taught people to juggle or even (barely) ride a unicycle after a lesson or two. That doesn't mean those aren't difficult skills to acquire.

Plus, many people who are learning do not have the privilege of an experienced teacher. Relying on instructions, videos, and trial & error takes more time and energy for most people. I agree with you that it's worth the effort though.

> Soapy water won't break down the molecularly bonded fat and iron on your cast iron.

In that case I'm not sure what the exact mechanism was. But I know that after others have used/cleaned a seemingly well-seasoned pan I've had to deal with chips, flakes, and/or rust and had to go back through the whole annoying seasoning process. And of course it's entirely possible that despite carefully following instructions that I've done the seasoning wrong -- chemistry is the only class I ever flunked.

> A drop of water should dance on a properly heated steel pan and things won't stick.

My partner made a similar recommendation. It sounds trivially easy but for whatever reason I have not managed to make it work. Given that cast iron (generally) works fine for me I've had minimal motivation to learn the idiosyncrasies of another material, though I would like to give it another shot at some point.

I have been learning how to season, cook with, and clean cast iron. As someone who did not grow up using it it’s definitely not intuitive. The other challenge is that I either have to lock it away or teach everyone else in the household how to care for it. At various points in my life I’ve had coatings ruined by roommates, partners, guests, and housekeepers who did things that seemed perfectly sensible like letting it soak in soapy water.

It's similar to how my partner has a stainless steel pan that I avoid using because I have not had the bandwidth to internalize the right ratio of heat, time, and oil to cook things on it without burning/sticking, whereas they have no issue with it. It's a good reminder not to take internalized skill for granted.

> There is a stop sign in front of my house and probably around 95% of cars stop

There was some discussion amongst my neighbors about a sign near us and we found that the key variable is the speed at which one considers a vehicle to be "stopped". Some folks felt that a 6 mph (10 kph) rolling stop at an empty intersection counted as a stop while others felt that anything more than 1 mph (1.6 kph) meant that the driver was running the stop sign. Since the majority of drivers fell somewhere in that range the estimates for how many people stopped were wildly different.

Besides slowing the vehicles behind you down to a safe and legal speed, a secondary advantage of obeying the speed limit on neighborhood streets is to influence routing algorithms.

Many routing algorithms base their decisions on past travel time and current traffic conditions. If you convince enough of your neighbors to drive legally then eventually the routing algorithms increase their anticipated travel time for those streets which (depending on what the alternatives are) may result in fewer people being routed onto those streets.

Judging solely by the desktop screenshot [1] it doesn't seem like a bad first pass but there are a few things that could be improved:

What jumped out first is the irregular post layout. For example the up/down arrows are farther from the image than the title, possibly to accommodate large, centered numbers. The titles can be at least three rows tall which results in posts that are quite different in height. The post images are all different heights and widths. Some users also have large circular icons that increase the height of the row while others have no icons. The other icon buttons are all slightly different sizes and appear to be from different sets. Finally, the content appears to be laid out a little haphazardly: why is the star icon next to the comments but the book icon next to the post's age? Why is the article's domain sandwiched between the community name and the age, and do we really need to show subdomains? (As an alternative, you could truncate large numbers with postfix magnitude to shrink their padding, make all images the same height/width, truncate long titles to two rows, make all icons the same optical size, and collapse the metadata to a single row such as: "From domain.org · Submitted by @name to community 11h ago · # Comments · star".)

The gray text on gray background results in poor contrast which makes it harder to read than necessary. This is especially apparent in the Posts/Comments and Subscribed/All toggles as the unselected option looks entirely disabled.

Finally, I'm not sure it works to put so many communities in one large block of wrapping rows. It may fit more content on the screen but makes for a loud block of bright green text that is attention-grabbing but hard to scan, especially since the list doesn't seem to have a visible sort order. It's also driving me crazy that the communities with icons result in inconsistent leading between rows. In that case I might start by finding out whether the page really needs to show six dozen subscriptions in the sidebar in the first place.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/ma...

Isn't this already true? The article makes that point at the very beginning and many people who cut ties or stopped supporting the FSF and Stallman still seem to be committed to the principles of libre software.

Advocacy involves 1) understanding your target audience and 2) making an appeal to them.

If the composition of your organization does not reflect the composition of your target audience then both of those tasks become a little harder. This is not specific to the FSF, many organizations hire at least a few people who match their target demographics to do things like research, marketing, messaging, and outreach.