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pedz

@ pedz @lemmy.ca

Posts
8
Comments
724
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • We can't even pump fuel anymore without holding a digital billboard (Netherlands)

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  • It's not always easy. I had to move. My new city/region has barely adequate public transit and my country has abysmal train services. So my bike is the main way to move around. It's really nice for short distances. Even longer ones in summer. I love it. I have panniers, trailers, and pull my inflatable kayak to the lakes and rivers around.

    However intercity travel here is horrible without a car. We have a pretty decent network of dedicated bike paths spreading like a web from my city and going into the countryside, but I don't always want to cycle 300 km to and fro to visit my parents. Plus, it's winter right now, so I rely a lot more on public transit, and sometimes it really makes me wish I would have a car instead of having to deal with underfunded transit and bike networks.

    I watch the people standing up in the crowded bus, that has to leave people behind at some stops because it's full, and I think to myself that society really really wants people to own a car; that transit users tolerate a lot of shit. And unfortunately, using public transit is also being subjected to an insane amount of ads.

    That's why I love my bike so much. But it would also be hypocrite of myself not to acknowledge that I sometimes stop at gas stations while bike touring, because I also need some fuel, like a sandwich and some electrolytes. There's going to be ads inside and the cashier might even offer a lottery ticket. No way to escape them.

    Still, if you wish to be car free, I hope you can attain that goal. Because even with that said, it's satisfying to move myself and my stuff without a car, or not having to constantly pay for gas. In a world where cars are systematic, at least where I live, it feels like an accomplishment to do things without one.

  • All the different Star Trek series on a triangle graph

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  • Pretty much the same. ENT was borderline with their war on terror phase, temporal war and some weird decisions, like introducing the Ferengi at that time... well, maybe I shouldn't scratch the surface too much. But some of it was good enough to make it an acceptable ensemble, at least to me. I've never been a huge fan of the movies but ended up seeing most of them.

    But it started to change with the movie in 2009. I didn't like it but it's ok, it's a single movie. I thought I'd wait for the next series but they continued with this kind of movies. Then Discovery happened and I was also disappointed. I still watch reviews of the new stuff and avoid all the crap about being too woke because I know ST has always been woke, but the way the stories are now presented is not piquing my interest. I don't mind preachy Trek, I like it, but IMHO The Orville is doing much better allegories than what modern ST produces. The new stuff seems like an attempt at being action/pop and so far, none of it seems to take place in a world/universe that I would like to know more about. I keep hoping they will fix this and have something different, but aside from LD, it's always more of the same to me.

    The last time a Star Trek project piqued my interest, it was Axanar, and the project got sued. Now with the new stories and bagage in the canon universe, I just feel like giving up on it. I was recently watching a new video about a character in Star Trek but it was featuring stuff from the new series, and I just stopped at that point. It feels like it's not for me anymore, and I shouldn't even bother. I'll just keep rewatching the very same list you mentioned, adding LD, and pretend the rest doesn't exist.

  • We can't even pump fuel anymore without holding a digital billboard (Netherlands)

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  • I've been car free all my life and not pumping gas into a multi ton vehicle that burns it to move everywhere I go is one of the nice parts.

  • How Canada and Sweden are redefining northern security and co-operation

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  • Because of old memes, if feels like something is missing every time I see the king of Sweden without a silly hat.

  • Canada’s elite media wants you to serve in the military

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  • We created an incredibly efficient method of transport and then most of us abandoned it

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  • Tell me you have never used a bike as transportation without telling me.

    A cheap bike trailer is like $120. How many times do you fill a tank of gas for that price. Wow, a bike trailer, what an extravagant thing to have compared to a whole car!

  • All the different Star Trek series on a triangle graph

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  • Sorry but except for LD, everything NuTrek doesn't fit at the top of that triangle for me, and belongs in either one of the bottom corner.

    Or maybe I just don't like Star Trek anymore. Just like Seymour; am I wrong for not liking NuTrek? No, it's the children who are wrong!

  • TIL putting solar panels on land currently used for biofuels would produce enough electricity for all cars and trucks to go electric

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  • I hope this is only to put things in perspectives because cars suck for a multitude of other reasons, however we power them.

    We can use solar energy to move a box that weighs 1/2 tons around, for every individual on the planet. The cars will still shed microplastics. The cars will still require paved parking lots that are not permeable, worsening floods, and generate heat islands. The cars will still kill one or two billion animals every year. The cars will still kill about a million people worldwide every year; one every 30 seconds.

    It would be nice to have this energy used for something else than powering deadly inefficient cars.

  • Can i install Debian with no DE and mix programs from several DEs?

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  • Aside from specific dependencies that may want some installed packages even if you don't use them, yes, it's fine.

    I have used Debian for 15 years, with Gnome 2 then MATE, and now I'm using Cinnamon, while mixing with any GTK apps I can find.

  • Who still uses IRC and why?

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  • I've been IRC for nearly 30 years and I still host my own server for the few friends that are also still going there. We were traditionally all going on Undernet but there's been massive attacks about 15 years ago and we migrated on our own network.

    I also host a web client called The Lounge so that we can view and paste images/mp4s/mp3s directly on channels, with previews, push notifications, and logging.

    We made the switch from plain text to web clients a few years ago and it really helped to modernize the experience and keep IRC relevant for us. If it was still only text I may have moved to another protocol. At one point I tried installing a Matrix server to replace IRC but found it too complex for simple chat and just stuck with web clients, like The Lounge or Convos.

  • after every cd

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  • To be even more efficient while being lazy, try oh-my-bash. You can start typing the beginning of a command and use arrow up to cycle through only those, instead of the whole history. So if you had a very long mount command and don't want to type it again, type mount and up arrow until it can be found. Not very useful for ls -al but very appreciated on longer commands.

  • I would push the rule

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  • No explanation needed

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  • The plate will be round but the lasagna stays square.

  • No explanation needed

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  • I can see the logic. It's made in a pot, eaten in a bowl, fairly liquid and remains liquid while stored.

    And lasagna is a square/rectangular food.

    But what about stew? My father makes a beef stew in the oven using a square casserole. The leftover is refrigerated in the same square casserole and the whole thing congeals into a square. So to me stew can be square.

  • I would push the rule

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  • I once brought my nephew camping on an island with millions of snails. When the evening came I didn't think much about them and proposed a bike tour around the island. Well, we will remember that. They were impossible to avoid just by their numbers so we were hearing dozens bouncing on the bike trailer, or being shot left and right by the wheels.

    My nephew was horrified. He wanted us to stop but we were now in the middle of it so we plowed through. Poor snails. But they should have known better than just fuck in the middle of a trail.

  • really whips the llamas arse

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  • Not just skins. Themes in general. Windows 95, 98 and XP had MS Plus! where people could install themes like this and modify Windows to their taste. And now Microsoft won't let you switch to dark mode if you don't have Windows activated.

    Customization was one of the biggest reason why I switched to Linux in the early 2000. I could apply a single GTK theme to most of my apps, in one click, while Microsoft was moving away from this. Oh the glorious days of having matching themes for XMMS and Gkrellm, with Compiz and wobbly windows. It's also why I stuck so much to GNOME 2 style of desktops and switched to MATE. I took my multiple years to give up on my favourite GTK2 theme.

    But even on Linux now is either white, or boring dark gray. Still much easier to personalize though. I miss the days of ricing my desktop until it looked lit this.

  • Wikipedia is one of the last genuine places on the Internet, and these rat bastards are trying to contaminate that, too

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  • The most recent one I saw was "Neige cause ralentissement de REM". It works translated in English, giving something like "Snow causes slowing down of REM", but in French it's missing enough articles to sound wrong. The cromulent sentence would have been "La neige cause le/un ralentissement du REM". Back into English this would add "The snow causes the/a slowing down of the REM". A missing "le/la", or using "de" instead of "du" doesn't change the meaning of a sentence, but it makes it obvious that it wasn't from a native speaker.

    Maybe it depends on the model and the source but so far, in French, for news, most of what I've read becomes uncanny after a few sentences. They often read like something passed through a translation program but just a tad better. You can understand it fine but it's missing an article there, reversing the word order in another sentence, uses vocabulary that is just slightly off, and often ends up like something written by someone that learned French as a second language for most of their life. A very good learner, nearly native level, but not quite there yet and still a bit off.

  • Convenience is relative

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  • As someone that doesn't have a car and uses coaches, public transit, or bicycles to get around, I've always found it ironic that people are willing to be stacked and piled into planes for hours but refuse to take a public bus ride for an hour. Planes are the only place where people can't just take their car to go somewhere and really have to put up with all the BS of traveling with other people.

    When I go visit my family and friends using public transit and it takes multiple hours, I sometimes fantasize that I could have gone to the airport and use the same amount of time to fly to a Caribbean island. People complain about planes but I've used public transit all my life so to me they're just a tad worse than a packed public bus. At least planes have power and bathrooms, even if you have to climb over other people to use them.

    I also love bike touring so sometimes instead of taking 2.5 hours to go visit my family using public transit, I use the greenways to cycle there, spend the night camping in a small provincial park, and finish the rest of the ride the next day. It usually takes about 7 hours of continuous cycling, without the pauses for rest/food and the overnight. I could rent a car and drive there in about 1.5 hour but then I wouldn't spend a night there. It's not always easy, but it's usually much more rewarding.

    So yeah, it's relative.

  • Which is your favourite?

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  • Any quality kit should also have pustulant beige.

  • Wikipedia is one of the last genuine places on the Internet, and these rat bastards are trying to contaminate that, too

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  • In French, one of the way to spot AI writing is that sentences will often miss articles or have bad grammar. Can this dude also ask the LLM to include more articles and make complete sentences in the language it's trying to imitate?

    I was using the Discover feed on my phone but Google started to insert rewritten stories & headlines by AI and they were so annoyingly bad at making simple sentences in French that it made me stop using that thing.