It would be quite rich for Greenpeace to position themselves as “enlightened centrists” willing to sell & promote fossil fuels on the VERY flawed assumption that biofuels are a) feasible and b) a meaningful improvement, while on the other hand being uncompromisingly hardline anti-nuclear and being at the heart of the plan to shut down existing power plants based on nothing more than their dogmatic beliefs.

If a rando energy provider sells fossil fuels, I don’t care. They’re just playing by the byzantine economic incentives set by the EU in an amoral capitalistic way. When Greenpeace does it, it is inherently a political statement and so deeply hypocritical that the only rational explanation is that they are deeply corrupt and/or profoundly stupid. Which would not matter if they weren’t, ideologically and politically, strongly influential on European environmentalist activism and policy.

Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y’know, the one selling both of those products) won’t advertise to you:

• Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can’t cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
• Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it’s less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
• Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don’t care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.

And even if the above wasn’t true and biogas was awesome (it’s awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.

Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can’t say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don’t have a better explanation for their stupidity.

Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it’s more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.

I’m sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.

Yes, I’m extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.

Every time they add the feature, half of the product breaks. The other half start using twice as much memory and compute, somehow.

They’ve got a pile of technical debt disguised as a product and the development velocity of the snail as a consequence. Very typical. The real question is “why hasn’t the competition eaten their lunch already”.

Real answer: those things matter to me because a quick frictionless experience very heavily dependant on muscle memory really helps with my ADHD. Laggy interfaces, having to hold left key for several seconds, and similar issues quickly pull my out of my train of thought.

It’s not about shaving 2 minutes off my day, it’s about not interrupting the flow.

I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.

Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.

It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.

The complete fracturing of children’s education post-war cannot be understated as a society-wide catastrophe.

Ironically stay-at-home mothers were already not the norm pre-war for the poors/minorities. Which participated in generational poverty as those children had a worse access to parenting and education. But the post-war middle class suddenly fell into that pattern as well, with similar results.

On top of that you’ve got the meteoric rise of car-centric urbanism, fracturing communities. It used to take a village to raise a child, now they can’t even walk across their neighborhood unsupervised because the roads aren’t safe for children. Indirectly, parents trust fewer and fewer community members to watch their children, making the task of raising small children unusually difficult and tiring.

Countries with more socialized childcare and better working conditions were better off overall, but the entire western world is facing a natality crisis because it truly is harder to raise a child now than it used to be. Which is absolutely bonkers because the world is also richer and more productive than at any other time in history.

There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

Well, yeah, that’s what Scrum is. From the guide which takes maybe 10 minutes to read

Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

That’s not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.

Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being “the worst”, after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You’re baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that’s on you champ, don’t blame the fucking recipe.

The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers’ jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers “POs” or “Scrum Masters” and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

The last thing I want is merge conflicts in my issue tracker. The git data model is simply not right for conversational histories.

ActivityPub is the obvious solution to decentralize public communication. We’re using it right now and AFAIK Forgejo is working to implement it for their issue tracker.

The game has more breadth than I thought it would, and the systems it does have (exploration, fighting, construction, farming) have wayyy more depth than Minecraft’s it does not feel fair to compare. There’s definitely enjoyment to be had for a while playing if the occasional random lag spike or disconnect is not a deal breaker for you.

But it’s not yet a Minecraft killer. Minecraft still has a much higher gameplay variation. In a couple years though I don’t think there will be much reason to play vanilla Minecraft except nostalgia.

No, blame the streaming companies. Dynamic range is a known standard. All they need is:

• a “louder dialogue” toggle switch to amplify the center channel in the downmixing settings (Kodi, many TVs, and all dedicated receivers can already do this FYI for this exact reason)
• a “night mode” toggle switch that turns on an audio compressor (my 20 year-old receiver has that feature – it’s hardly rocket science; I believe YouTube calls it “stabilized audio”).

Upsides:

• preserves high dynamic range mix for audiophiles
• works with already released movies (!!!)
• improves the life of people with tinny speakers, strict loudness requirements, or hearing impairments

Downsides:

• Can’t feel superior to audio engineers who are doing their jobs, I guess?
• Streaming companies need to reinvest a few thousand dollars out of the billions they are making to add those two buttons

Drawings are one conversation I won’t get into.

GenAI is vastly different though. Those are known to sometimes regurgitate people or things from their dataset, (mostly) unaltered. Like how you can get Copilot to spit out valid secrets that people accidentally committed by typing NPM_KEY=. You can’t have any guarantee that if you ask it to generate a picture of a person, that person does not actually exist.

I mean, Nestlé killed hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries. I think the Oracle service APIs can’t be that bad, though I’m sure they would be if it made Larry Ellison $50.

Your description of the sound just got me making a bunch of seal sounds by myself. Congrats!

No-one is immune from propaganda. And those awful books promote quite a few bad messages. Well firstly they promote criminally bad writing. But besides that, they work very hard to make a lot of oppressive power structures sound cool, whimsical, and aspiring to the uncritical reader. From the police institution to the prison complex to the famously abusive English boarding school system to the literal ethnostate to slavery somehow, and I haven’t gone over the half of it.

It truly feels like every other bit worldbuilding that Rowling put in sounds whimsical on the surface but makes you go “wait, the implications are truly terrible!” when you think about it for more than two seconds. Except she clearly did not think most of it through; she literally just thought “race of jewish caricatures who want nothing out of life besides being bankers” is good and whimsical worldbuilding… And somehow got away with it.

It’s impossible to quantify or prove but these books have had the most cultural impact out of any modern book franchise, and I don’t see how the systemic normalization of so many awful things to uncritical children and teenagers can balance out the joy and whimsy that people got out of them (especially when there is so much better written teen/YA fiction out there).

Shifting the Overton Window in the way that those books did is some insidious type shit that actually does matter quite a bit more than most people realize. New hot take: I think the bigots are correct to get big mad at Queer representation in media because it moves the Overton Window the other way and that actually impacts bigots long-term. In a very real sense a trans actor in a movie is a concrete and real step towards the de-legitimization of bigoted views. And HP is very much doing the opposite of that every time it touches on any kind of social subject.

The work itself is definitely a fascist pre-cursor. The whole “Wizarding society” thing is the mythical ethnostate from which everyone else must be excluded to avoid violence. That fact is so central to Rowling’s beliefs that it’s barely a theme in the books, just straight up a fundamental fact about the world barely worth commenting on. And even though HP is pretty sanitized wannabe liberal slop, she still manage to slip in some very racist stuff (slavery allegory about slaves being happy, “Cho Chang”, the Irish boy who constantly blows shit up, etc.).

I do believe that Rowling herself is not a very intelligent person (the quality of her writing is proof enough) and has incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance from trying to fit in with the liberals who made her successful, while holding some incredibly backwards view on many social topics. You’re right that she’s not a fascist per se, because she doesn’t have fascism’s consistent belief in self-ideology. At the same time much of her political activism has been so enabling to open fascists that it begs the question: does the label matter? Is the sheep who opens the gate to the wolf not, in its own way, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Are U.S. Republicans not fascists just because they are more concerned about their own self-interest than any alliance to ideology?

What pisses me off is that you’re 100 % correct but most of it is unintentional on Rowling’s part. She’s a fascist reactionary and she just, for the most part, enthusiastically described her perfect little ideal society.

Everyone is in their place, the good guys work very hard to maintain the existing social order, and the people at the bottom are there because that is in their very nature and really they just like it that way and attempting to elevate them is futile. Textbook fascism and all of it is presented completely deadpan because this is Rowling’s genuine beliefs.

Hot take: HP’s popularity is responsible for more societal ills than pretty much any other book in print. Almost no-one engages with it critically even amongst the crowd that outwardly disagrees with Rowling’s more recent political activism. Fuuuuck that license.

“Just another action movie” but the guy up the comment chain is literally dozing off. Part one actually has very little action in it, most of it is packed landscape shots, politics, and lore dumping. Which is very accurate to the source material. If you dislike Villeneuve’s adaptation, I can only assume you did not love the Herbert books because he was incredibly faithful to the tone, especially for material that was thought to be impossible to adapt to the big screen.

Lynch’s stuff is simply not comparable because he said “fuck the source material” and just kinda did whatever came to him in some acid trip or other. Fine if that’s your thing but that’s not what Dune is - especially not the first few books.