As an Australian who has lived with compulsory helmets for decades I think wearing a helmet and high vis is probably bare minimum if you have to share with cars and not nearly enough if you have to use door lanes and deal with Ford Rangers and garbage trucks.
Unfortunately once you go down this route cycling partipation drops and its a net fail for public health.
Sedate cycling on seperated pathways and through parks gets lumped in with high risk road cycling. It ends up being completely inappropriate for the type of cycling most people would like to do (not high risk vehicular cycling).
Why bother building expensive dedicated safe infrastructure when people have a magical inch of styrofoam on their noggins and a yellow shirt to protect them from 2 tonnes of murder machine.
This is very satisfying in a schadenfreude kind of way. I have been lectured to by Americans and those influenced by them for decades about the importance of their constitutional freedoms to shoot children and spread hate speech.
Some liberal western democracies don't even have a codified constitution and still have better human rights and fairer government than the USA. Without a well functioning representative democracy with preferential or proportional voting, concentrating enormous executive power in a single tyrant without strong protections was always obviously exploitable.
I think a lot of them are still living in denial and think the good guys are going to come in and defend the constitution at the last minute. Hope they are right. It is one hell of a gamble for them and the rest of us.
I really, really hope there are some smart patriotic people in our military and public service that have developed a backup command and control system independent of the US.
Hopefully we will never need such a thing but with a President who isn't fit for office threatening NATO and Canada it would be prudent to have well developed credible alternatives even as we play the game of placating and ingratiating ourselves with the US leadership and their cronies.
Guns are still a thing here in Australia. It's just more balanced and reasonable than the USA.
My town has a shooting club, game reserves and is surrounded by farms. Seasonally we wake up to the sound of gunfire in the distance from hunters.
I've known professional people in the heart of our biggest cities who love nothing more than to head out bush and shoot feral animals when they can.
You won't stumble onto a firearm at your kids school for obvious reasons but there could be some under lock and key in a gun safe at your mates house. It's not unreasonable to know some basics.
Star Trek, at least before Roddenberry's vision was corrupted, was a fictional post scarcity socialist utopia. The AI served the crew and society. It wasn't there to exploit and replace them on behalf of a handful of Ferengi billionaires.
Star Trek's ship AI is nothing like the huge financial scams, exploitation and concentration of power, wealth and political influence we are currently seeing. AI hate mostly isn't about machine learning and its applications. It's about the people behind it.
When we have warp drives, fusion, replicators, universal basic income and free universal health care we may have a different view.
For someone who subbed to self hosted almost as soon as they joined Lemmy I am really conservative about what I host. I have tried to keep all media in jellyfin to keep things sinple. But recently I expanded to audiobookshelf and wow!
Ripped some of my audiobooks and added some podcasts and now we have a family library and everyone has their own progress and settings working across devices. I am still spending a lot of time consuming media but I think it's a much healthier balance.
Git was designed specifically so people could work independently and not have to rely on a server. GitHub is not git. GitHub is an attempt to control the marketplace for code and exploit the network effects to lock people in and control them. It's facebook and linkedn for programmers. We never needed that and many of us never wanted that.
You can do distributed development with git without any centralised infrastructure. It's what it was made for.
It was (and is) spot on but Microsoft won the war for minds and lots of people in the Linux community started using Microsoft products like vscode and calling them good guys because they were running Linux datacenters and making kernel contributions. Microsoft employed some really good people working on some cool things. You were called out for being immature and holding outdated grudges if you used slang terms and you couldn't participate in conversations and be taken seriously.
Meanwhile Microsoft was still being Microsoft. They bought the defacto town square - github - in an attempt to control the platform. Then they mined the content to train LLMs. Now the LLMs bombard open source projects with crap. Even as Windows is dying they are trying to drag us down as well.
They are a big company and big companies sometimes do good things. No hate on their engineers. But Microsoft have always been the enemy and they will always be the enemy. It is their nature.
Invade them. Drag the fucker off in chains and parade him to the press. Oh, no wait he is politically protected. Nice society they have over there where they pardon criminals and don't prosecute fraudsters and pedos because of political connections. Must make people proud. Greatest democracy on Earth. Very Christian of them. Punish the poor, reward immorality, just like it said in the bible? Fucking weirdos.
The bad guys normalised racism, fraud, sexism and a lot of other evils and had people cheering for them as they flouted the law and protected each other from prosecution. It has been bad for ever regardless of who was in power with the two tier justice system that protected the elites while punishing everyone else. But we are in the end game now. The masks are off
You too can be allowed to sample the vices of the wealthy elites, in moderation and under their control. In return all they ask is your loyalty. Seems kind of weird and out of touch to me. Regular people mostly just want good health, a place to raise a family, some free time and a decent income. No AI hallucination is going to substitute. They think so little of us.
Why do people complain about using nazi social media despite the option of non nazi social media or not using social media at all. Like grow a fucking brain people.
We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.
Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.
Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.
We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.
A lot of people seem to feel like this. It's obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.
And it's always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.
I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don't tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.
No regulation. Robber barons own all the media and politicians. How it got to this in more functional democracies under the rule of law I can't explain. If this shit had come from Russia or China or North Korea it would be shitcanned instantly. I don't know why we put up with it. The influence of US bots on the voting public internationally is frightening. They are driving people insane.
3 years! No fuck that. I want affordable computer upgrades before then. If they don't crash and burn in 26 I will be very disappointed. Everyone call your super funds and ask them if they are exposed to this bubble. Let's start the divestment ball rolling.
Don't consume any AI products. Don't consume any products made or marketed with AI products. Don't support any companies than invest in AI or are invested in because of AI. Lets kill this nonsense in 2026 and bring computing, jobs and wealth back into the hands of ordinary people. And a prememptive - NO BAILOUT for the tech bros when this shit crashes.
Speed limit Rangers to 40kph within city limits. They usually speed through school zones and roadworks so it won't slow them down but we might get a few disqualified from driving which will help.