I used to be really into cars in the late 90’s. But I got into other stuff since, and car stuff kinda fell off my radar.

Last week I read an article talking about how automatic transmissions are up to like 8 gears on average. And cars seem so computerized now, I’m wondering whether the old mechanical systems for things like variable valve timing have just given way to totally electronic systems.

What can you tell me about what has happened since, say, 2000, in regular ICE cars?

Wouldn’t you want to know what these texts are saying?

They aren’t saying what you think they are saying.

Can you give an example? This sounds intriguing.

Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.

But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don’t think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn’t quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he’d been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.

So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.

And the comment-section on those type of post isn’t the right place for a “philosophical” discussions that would otherwise be on topic for that sub/community, but exactly align with topic of that post or news article.

Can you explain why you believe this? I’ve always understood deep dives into the topic or context or general issues raised by an article to be fair game, whether we’re talking the comments on the news article itself, a link on Reddit, a link on Hacker News, a link on a vBulletin/phpBB forum, or even old newsgroup/listserv discussions.

Reddit’s decision to start allowing “self” posts that were only links back to the comments thread itself (showing just how link-centered the design of reddit originally was, that every post had to have a link to something) came after the discussions around links became robust enough to support comments-first threads.

I know, right? I think some of the answers in this thread are wild.

People are allowed to have their own hygiene boundaries, but some of the views in this thread seem fundamentally incompatible with dancing with other people.

Ha, ok, I definitely got whooshed then.

It’s the meme format:

“Men will literally (something) but not go to therapy”

People who use it don’t necessarily endorse the original view, but are making fun of it.

As of last year, English Wikipedia, articles only, text only, was about 22GB compressed (text compresses pretty efficiently), according to the current version of this page:

As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media

Some other sources describe the uncompressed offline copies as being around 50 GB, with another 100 GB or so for images.

Wikimedia, which includes all the media types, has about 430 TB of media stored.

The populist message has always done so well regardless of political party because we all see how broken the system is and candidates like Obama, Sanders, and even Trump capitalize on that message to win hearts and minds.

I don’t think it’s correct to describe the populist message as overwhelmingly successful. Sanders didn’t win. Trump won once and lost once (and in fact lost the popular vote both times). We can trace back a bunch of other populists who failed, too.

The nuts and bolts of elections and campaigns tend to reward coalition builders. Populists with no establishment allies tend not to do well (note that Obama courted the popularity of the masses at the same time that he was locking up endorsements from the Democratic Party’s old guard, including Biden, Byrd, Kennedy, and Dodd).

Humans tend to sort themselves into coalitions, led by organizations. Popularity is a feedback loop, and the fickle public can and does change their collective mind over whether someone is beloved or not.

I’m going to come at this from my own ethical and moral framework, and try to explain myself well enough to allow you to either agree or clearly see where we disagree.

I’ve always been of the mindset that if you have a good product, shockingly little marketing is required.

Marketing creates value in an ethical way when it helps match supply to demand, and reduces search friction for mutually beneficial transactions. Those mutually beneficial transactions distribute resources in a way that increases the overall utility in a society.

Thus, ethical marketing is still useful in an economy or specific markets where searching is difficult or costly. Plenty of useful products languish on the vine, and need consumer discovery in order to succeed.

As an example, some of my favorite restaurants I’ve ever eaten at have been forced to throw away food when there has been insufficient dining volume to use all those ingredients. Sometimes it’s happened enough that the restaurant fails as a business. And restaurants as an industry are terrible with getting their product known to the public. So there’s probably some benefit there in the act of marketing, advertising, and sales for those restaurants.

If you have your own ethical guideposts on which industries produce products that suffer from that problem (good product that
insufficient people know about, where producers are struggling), maybe focusing in on those fields/industries could be productive.

I mean Rust is a godsend as a decision for the language to use.

I have no dog in the fight, but Penguincoder has been pretty vocal about Rust being the wrong choice for a web service: slow to develop and modify, easy to make mistakes that take much more work to fix later (and blames this fact for the state of the lemmy codebase). Its greatest strength is the speed of execution, but that doesn’t really matter for web servers, that are basically never CPU limited.

I can’t imagine anything even major needing changing, let alone a full rewrite.

I think the moderation tool examples given sound pretty broken, and it isn’t just Beehaw admins complaining about them. Lemmy.world and a few others have instance admins complaining about how hard it is to remove images from the server (deleting posts/users/comments just orphans the image file without deleting the associated file), how all the moderation functions seem not to contemplate the federation issue (removing an abusive comment or banning a user on one instance does nothing to address that same problematic content already federated to another instance).

The best conversations happen among small groups of people selected out of a huge, huge pool of people.

Niche interests and discussions need to be able to advertise their existence to millions in order to persuade that dozen people to actually participate.

@[email protected] is a pretty active dev for Beehaw, has been very open about his views that the lemmy software is built on very shaky foundations, including the programming language and architecture choices underpinning the whole thing, making moderation unnecessarily difficult and making it hard to comply with legal requirements of hosting such a service, and providing severe limits to scale. It might make more sense to build up a new forum from the ground up, compatible with ActivityPub, than to try to fork Lemmy, or persuade Lemmy’s existing maintainers to start accepting big patches.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that an individual user should be able to override their instance admins’ preferences on access for content-related reasons, but I don’t think it would be workable from an administrative viewpoint to allow users to allowlist instances that were blocklisted for administrative reasons.

Lemmy.world dealt with (and is probably still dealing with) a series of malicious actions designed to actually bring down the service or otherwise tie up its resources (including moderator/admin attention and effort, and exposure to literal criminal charges), using maliciously crafted requests to bring down servers, literally illegal content posted to their servers, etc. Defederation in response to these types of attacks would be defeated if a user could let the content come through anyway.

I imagine most instances are dealing with similar issues.

So ideally we’d need to be able to create 4 categories of relationships with other instances:

1. Blocked no matter what
2. Blocked by default for users, can be user overridden
3. Allowed by default for users, can be user overridden
4. Allowed no matter what (not sure what the use case for this status would be, but seems to be trivial to implement since it already exists as default).

But I think you’d find that the typical scenario that justifies blocking would actually put the typical block into category 1, not category 2.

I feel like a bid/ask function wouldn’t be that technically difficult to implement.

A driver can punch in minimums: Maybe there’s a driver who is only willing to drive for $10 per ride, $0.50 per minute, and $0.25 per mile at a particular moment in time, and maybe a multiplier or premium for certain routes that involve tolls or larger passenger groups, etc., or a discount for pre-booking at least certain number of hours or days in advance. Maybe the pricing could take into consideration more variables (idle time versus driving time, pickup distance, minimum rider rating, etc.). Potential riders punch in their desired routes and they get real-time pricing information on the available drivers and the quoted price according to each driver’s formula.

The formulas shouldn’t be that hard for the driver or the passenger, from their interface, as long as the service has access to go route data.

Vim is a text editor that works in a command line and therefore doesn’t require a graphical interface or windowing system, or anything like a mouse or trackpad or touch interface. It has a whole system of using the keyboard to do a bunch of things really efficiently, but the user has to actively go and learn those keyboard shortcuts, and almost an entire language of how to move the cursor around and edit stuff. It’s great once you learn it, so it creates a certain type of evangelist who tries to spread the word.

This meme template is perfect, because the vim user really did learn a bunch of stuff, and then wants to try to convince other people to do the same, using a pretty unpersuasive rationale (not using a mouse while programming).

Young people tend to be more persuadable before 30, and tend to bake in their political views around that age. So big events in one’s 20’s tend to lead to lasting partisan affiliations for life after that.

FDR’s presidency won over a lot of people to the Democrats in the 30’s and 40’s. Eisenhower’s presidency shifted people over to Republicans in the 50’s. Nixon pushed people away from Republicans. But by the 70’s Democrats were losing a lot of voters, and then Reagan won a bunch of people over to the GOP. Then 9/11 won people over to Republicans, while the Iraq war pushed them away.

But each of these things had an outsized effect on those under 30. So Boomers who remember getting fed up with Democrats in the 70s and crossing over for Reagan (and then voting Republican in every election since) just thought it was the effect of age, rather than the effect of that particular political moment in 1980.

And even though this data and the analysis is mainly for Americans, it’s probably reflective of how people shape their own political beliefs everywhere.

Each subreddit had its own atmosphere and culture and environment. I would expect the same to happen here, only with an opportunity for different instances to also foster their own dynamics, in addition to each community within each instance.

We’re too small to have niche thriving communities

The same was largely true of reddit when I joined (in about 2008 or 2009). There were a lot of technology/science/engineering/programming people in the mix, so there was good content for that, but most of what it was just kinda grew out of some ideas that had come from other forums (lolcats style content, advice animals memes) and from internal inside trends organically bubbling up within the community (the concepts of the AMA, TIL, ELI5, AITA, narwhal fandom, grumpy cat, reddit switcheroo), and then weird turns of phrases the people started repeating elsewhere like a cargo cult (the overuse of the word “obligatory,” accidentally a whole word, ಠ_ಠ, playing with movie titles by adding or removing or switching letters). We saw the rise and fall of some content creators and power users, the rise and fall of communities (/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, inglip, space dicks, all sorts of communities that eventually got banned).

Trends don’t stop trending. Any community, large or small, ends up developing its own cultural touchstones and a shared history. Eventually we’ll see things turn from innovative to an inside joke to overdone within different lemmy communities, too.

But I do miss having the “fucking [insert slur here]” “kill yourself” “only a basement-dwelling loser would have this opinion” comments auto-hid because the average passing user disapproved of it and decided to express their disapproval via downvote, instead of coming across it myself semi-frequently and reporting it.

This is why I think downvotes are an important element of the UI and ranking algorithms. No matter how many members there are, or how many comments or votes there are, there are still going to be 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. So naturally, smaller communities actually tend to have larger gaps in mod coverage in length of time between an item going onto the mod queue and being resolved by a human mod.

So I’m in favor of mechanisms being built in for removing content from easy view, without mods. Downvotes seems like the easiest way to implement that kind of mechanism.

Restricted membership groups are still valuable, no matter what you want to call it.

Shared experiences are often a good foundation for a group: residents of a particular neighborhood, alumni of a particular school, members of a particular family, etc. You can see lively discussion there that opens up in a way that might not happen in a general open group.

Common beliefs also form a good foundation for group membership. Almost every religion has meetings of other members of that religion, where discussion can happen within that framework of that religion’s views. A Baptist bible study group wouldn’t tolerate a new member coming in and just insisting every meeting that the Bible is fake and that Christianity is a lie. Does it create an “echo chamber” of only people who believe in a specific religion? Well, yes, because that’s the point, and why those members choose to congregate there.

Hell, I’m in a sibling chat thread where specific members of my family feel safe talking about their struggles with their significant others, roommates, jobs, neighbors, etc., because we like being able to bounce ideas off of people raised like us, by the same parents, in the same household. I don’t think we’d be able to have that productive conversation if we didn’t have that specific thread that we knew was just for us, and not for the other people in our lives to read and comment on.

Unless you’re taking the radical view that people shouldn’t be allowed to congregate in smaller groups that restrict membership, safe spaces are a natural consequence of how people associate with one another.