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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2025

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  • So is the plan is to use a heat-pump to cool the computers while getting some waste-product as hot as possible, and then eject the waste product? Or perhaps rather than ejecting it, the heat could be put into a large surface-area heat-sink thing to just radiate the energy black-body-style…

    I think ideas like this are fair and reasonable if we have to have a data centre in space (for example, if we wanted people to live indefinitely on a space-colony or something like that). But its pretty clear that no plan will ever be anywhere near as good as what we can do on the planet’s surface.

    Building and operating these things on the Earth’s surface is already expensive and resource intensive. And doing it in space is going to be a lot worse.


  • I’m very much anti-car. I don’t own a car. My apartment doesn’t have a car park (at my request before it was built). … But I think you’re really over-egging the utility of horses. I don’t think they are anywhere near as viable in dense urban environments. I’d say a bicycle is far more realistic alternative to a car (I say that from experience). Perhaps an electric bike depending on your needs.

    Keeping a horse takes a huge amount of space and resources. Perhaps you can do that if you live in a rural area and own a bit of farmland; but otherwise, I don’t think its is affordable or practical to own horse.


  • I’ve talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don’t care, because it hasn’t blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.

    But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it’s very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as “it hasn’t been active for very long. Lets wait and see.”

    I just think that’s interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don’t totally match my internet social circles.


  • That ladybird gender thing is such a load of crap. I find it hard to even believe that people are genuinely passionate about it. Every time ladybird is mentioned, someone brings up the ‘extreme views’ based on this. But it is the biggest load of nothing you are ever likely to see.

    For anyone who doesn’t know, here’s what happened:

    • The build documentation for this unreleased pre-beta software used the pronoun ‘he’.
    • Someone suggested that they change it to be more inclusive.
    • The author didn’t think it was important enough to change, so left it.
    • More requests and pressure came to change the pronoun.
    • The pronoun was then changed, and the author apologised.

    To me, that’s a minor error of judgement, with no lasting harm caused to anyone at all. But yet somehow this is constantly used as a reason to avoid ladybird.


    How can I take this seriously? Is this some kind of organised anti-competition propaganda campaign? We’re talking about a free and open source project of a highly technical nature, and somehow people are upset that the word ‘he’ existed temporarily in a work-in-progress document with a target audience of essentially zero people. The people making this project are not political leaders or public figures with media training. They are focused on the technical side of things. Yeah, the pronoun was a mistake, but it pretty much the smallest mistake you could possibly make in this context. It not like they are donating to right-wing orgs, or publicly denouncing anyone, or promoting hate. I see far worse than what they did on a daily basis from all sorts of people - including right here in lemmy. And in terms of ladybird, I have not heard of any kind of misstep ever since this instant - which was a very long time ago now. It is honestly bizarre that people have clung onto this incident. I’m honestly not sure I believe that the backlash is entirely organic. It’s just too disproportionate.

    [edit] Let me just follow this by saying that I do think there are other good reasons to be upset with this same ladybird dev. I just don’t think the ‘he’ in the docs thing is anything at all.






  • I understand that you personally want a fancy clipboard with lots of features; but for me, I actually explicitly deliberately only want a single item clipboard. I want the predictable simple certainty of what is and what is not stored in the clipboard. And if I ever had a multi-item clipboard with a UI interface, I’d be calling that confusing bloatware and looking for how to delete it.

    So I don’t think we should rank each OS by how fancy its clipboard is.